Intellectual Role Quotes

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term "intellectual" should act in the manner that [ Edward] Said prescribes, that's another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.

In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

What intellectuals have done is that they've brought to the surface important problems that face society, that are on the subconscious of culture, of society. They've provided societies with insights, with concepts, with perspectives that allowed people and communities to make sense of the world.

To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.

You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.