Intellectual Conformity Quotes

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

The near-total control of the most prestigious universities and colleges by intolerant extremists of the left is breeding not only generations of entitled little authoritarians but legions of apologists for violence against their own perceived enemies.

What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.

The New York Times is filled with Ivy League graduates and so is the Washington Post. I mean, it's all the same club. They may be Ivy League educated, but they're not smart. Their minds are closed. They actually are mind-numbed robots. They have been programmed all their lives. They're not even thinkers. These are people who have been programmed to believe what they believe. They are committed believers, not thinkers.

The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.

The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.

Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.

Today the most effective way to disabuse a student of the idea that he can know truth is to send him to an elite college.

It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

Millions of people are provided with their thoughts as with their clothes; authors, printers, booksellers, and newsmen stand, in relation to their minds, simply as shoemakers and tailors stand to their bodies.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion.

What makes this mentality dangerous is that when the team is held together by careerism and mindless partisanship, individual members are punished for thinking for themselves.

The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.

There is no greater way to ensure that universities remain a hotbed of leftist thought than to guarantee that professors knight their own successors. But that's basically how the Ph.D. system works, with sitting professors approving the work of would-be professors.

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak.

One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'.