intellectual opposition Quotes

Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative.

Capitalism will destroy itself by breeding a new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.

So far there has been little discussion among gender scholars about the need to engage with skeptics. They tend to view skeptics and dissenters as cranks.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy the first notice of a prey.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me.... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.

Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.

THE GUYS IN THE OLD DAYS WHO BELIEVED THE EARTH WAS ROUND MUST HAVE HAD A VERY ROUGH TIME WITH ACADEMIA

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.