Petrus Paulus Vergerius Quotes
We cannot deny that there is still a horde—as I must call them—of people who, like Licinius the Emperor [Roman Emperor, ruled 81-96], denounce learning and the Arts as a danger to the State and hateful in themselves.
Petrus Paulus Vergerius, 1349-1444, Italian Educator, Humanist & Physician, Treatise on education for Ubertino, the son of Francesco Carrara
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Even sophisticated societies have anti-intellectual movements. This happened in revolutionary France, but also at times even in the United States. In 2012, for example, Rick Santorum a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination called President Obama a “snob” for wanting to enable all students to go to college. Santorum was appealing to an anti-intellectual movement in the country that distrusted intellectuals as “elites.”
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
This was written when Islam was intellectually far more advanced than Christian Europe. This viewpoint was one of the reasons for their advanced civilization. It was held by many. It is still held by many Muslims, but for the fundamentalist of Islam today, ignorance of anything that is not in the Koran or other sayings of the Prophet is a virtue. Madrassas throughout the Islamic world teach only the Koran and religious law and nothing of mathematics, philosophy, science, history and never of other religions.
There has always been in America a subpopulation which has distrusted intellectuals and educated people. The bias against intellectuals and well educated people ebbs and flows but it is always present. In this 1920 quotation the suspicion was there as today but did not have the name calling that tended to accompany this bias in the latter part of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. Some of the bias is in reaction to a snobbishness that has been exhibited by some intellectuals, but the bias against intellectuals is generally strongest amongst the least educated groups in America. The South in particular has tended to have the weakest educational systems and institutions, and the vast majority of intellectuals were against the Southern racism and discrimination that used to prevail so extensively, and the vestige of anti intellectualism is still there despite the fact that the gap between Southern education and institutions is nowhere near as large as it used to be. Religious fundamentalists also are generally more distrustful of intellectuals as even where the intellectuals are religious they tend to be modernists and not fundamentalists. And of course, liberal and conservative intellectuals constantly accuse the other group of dominating the intellectual agenda.
