Adam Bellow Quotes

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.

History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

The academic mind, as we know, is sometimes capable of assuming an aggressive attitude. The official mind, on the contrary, is and has to be, expert in the art of self- defense.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat. They do not try to persuade at any cost. They appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority ...

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.

At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.