Intellectual Quotes - page 76
I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.
William James
[Ur-Fascism] depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
Umberto Eco
Milton Friedman was not surprised. In 1968, in one of the decisive intellectual achievements of postwar economics, Friedman not only showed why the apparent tradeoff embodied in the idea of the Phillips curve was wrong; he also predicted the emergence of combined inflation and high unemployment, which Paul Samuelson dubbed "stagflation."
Paul Krugman
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.
Henry David Thoreau
These grand discoveries, which some ascribed to the 'enormous batteries which were placed in his hands,' were the result of his intellectual powers, not of fortuitous circumstances. His voltaic battery was within the reach of many of the chemists of Europe; and consisted, in fact, of three different batteries united, one of 24 plates of copper and zinc, 12 inches square, another of 100 plates of 6 inches, and another of 150 plates of 4 inches.
Humphry Davy
The approach presented in my book The Idea of Justice shares the general Enlightenment interest in relying on reasoning in general and public reasoning in particular, and in this respect there is something very substantially in common between the two alternative disciplines of reasoning that emerged from the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment period, that is, between the Hobbesian and Kantian reasoning (with its successors today, such as the Rawlsian social contract approach) and the reasoning of Smith and Condorcet (with its successors today, such as normative social choice theory).
Amartya Sen
At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes - the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class - were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
The great theme of his remarkable explorations in intellectual history is the danger of all constructivism, the belief that we can deliberately design social arrangements which will be better than those we unwittingly hit upon. Paradoxically, however, the drive of Hayek's own work is itself characteristically that of a rationalist construction. Admiring David Hume and detesting Auguste Comte, his genius was to marry the sceptical insights of the one to more than a touch of the compulsive rigour of the other.
Friedrich Hayek
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage-the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Ayn Rand
Second, we must acknowledge that school readiness is not only about promoting early literacy and other academic skills. Science tells us that how children feel is as important as how they think, particularly if we are concerned about their capacity to succeed when they get to school. Knowing the alphabet and counting to 10 are not enough, if you can't sit still or pay attention in the classroom. All young children, regardless of their God-given abilities and economic circumstances, must be engaged in caring relationships and provided with a variety of opportunities to learn in a safe and stimulating environment. We already know what is needed to promote the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to learn in school. The time has come for this nation to use that knowledge to help all children achieve that competence -- for their own sake, for the sake of their teachers and classmates, and for the sake of America's future.
Ted Kennedy
Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level - always make them reach out. ... If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don't set your writing - and teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
M. H. Abrams
A deep sense of humor and an unusual ability for telling stories and jokes endeared Johnny even to casual acquaintances. He could be blunt when necessary, but was never pompous. A mind of von Neumann's inexorable logic had to understand and accept much that most of us do not want to accept and do not even wish to understand. This fact colored many of von Neumann's moral judgments. "It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature." Only scientific intellectual dishonesty and misappropriation of scientific results could rouse his indignation and ire - but these did - and did almost equally whether he himself, or someone else, was wronged.
E. P. Wigner
In India lay the real source of all tongues, of all thoughts and utterances of the human mind. Everything - yes, everything without exception - has it origin in India." and "The primary source of all intellectual development - in a word the whole human culture - is unquestionably to be found in the tradItions of the East.
Friedrich Schlegel
Jiang: You all... My feeling is that you the media need to learn more. You are very familiar with the Western set of values, but after all you are too young. Do you understand what I mean? Let me tell you, I've been through hundreds of battles. I've seen a lot. Which country in the West have I not been to? Every time... You should know Mike Wallace in the US. He's way above you all! He and I talked cheerfully and humorously, which is why the media need to raise your intellectual level. Got it or not?
Jiang Zemin
Instead of entertaining visions of a final victory of reason over magic and ignorance, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the norms and ideals which permit the advancement of knowledge have to be defended in every generation against new enemies, who reappear like the heads of the Hydra as soon as others are decapitated, and who employ ever-new labels, catchwords and slogans to play on the perennial weaknesses of mankind. Whatever happens in the instrumental exact sciences, we can be sure that in matters where intellectual and moral considerations mesh, the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness will never end.
Stanislav Andreski
Once Hindu society has shaken off these Hindu-baiting leeches, i.e. when it is no longer under their mental spell, it can concentrate on developing and actualizing the treasures it has to offer to mankind, and achieving genuine national integration. Actually, this national integration that every talking body in India talks about, is a very natural condition and needs no achieving. Rather, it requires dropping a few things. It requires dropping the anti-Hindu separatist doctrines that have largely been created for the purposes of several imperialisms, and are now being kept afloat with a lot of distortive intellectual and propagandistic effort. Just drop this effort, and this country will naturally find back its unity.
Koenraad Elst
Such superstitions which are in flagrant conflict with scientific universalism, should be dealt with by intellectuals, and the state will have done more than its share if it does not impede the broadcasting of their criticism of these superstitions. The state should just refrain from banning books eventhough they hurt the feelings of those steeped in the said superstitions. It should refrain from pressurizing or boycotting or prosecuting people who perform their legitimate task of educating people concerning such superstitions. It should refrain from imposing history-distortions on schoolbooks, i.e. from concealing the truth about the evil effects of such superstitions. (That the Indian state is so far not secular enough to refrain from this sabotage of the intellectual struggle against superstition, is shown in ch. 12)
Koenraad Elst
Whatever the mistakes committed by the Hindu Ayodhya movement on the ground, at the intellectual level it is a struggle for truth and honesty, against attempts (some petty, some high-handed) to falsify history. On the other hand, the stand taken by leading negationist historians in this debate wil be studied in the future as a classic in latter-day Marxist history falsification.
Koenraad Elst
