Public Intellectual Quotes

I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

Juan Williams is a very sharp guy.

Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the "intellectual" in the sense of the term that he defines.

Schlesinger was that rare thing, a historian and a maker of history.

Henry Louis Gates is such a wealth of knowledge in himself.

I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.

Thomas Sowell is America's foremost public intellectual and for good reason. His work covers almost every subject imaginable- race, economics, Marxism, ethnic groups, immigration patterns, just to name a few. He is persuasive and provocative and always scintillating. I've read all his books and never been even faintly disappointed. Black Rednecks & White Liberals is no exception.

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.

I am a big fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He's the voice of science and scientific thinking in the United States and the world. He's the most visible proponent of scientific thinking, and he's very unflinching about it. He knows that it's correct and vouches for it in a very intelligent and very firm way, which I really appreciate.

Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.

Rebecca Solnit is a clarion voice of reason.

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.

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.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to . . a faceless professional.

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently.

I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.

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

William F. Buckley, Jr. does not so much speak as exhale, but he exhales polysyllabically, and the results are remarkable.

… establishment bobblehead Fareed Zakaria

I am not indifferent to the appreciation of kind people. [The voters were] extremely kind in naming me the world's top public intellectual, a title to which I can never see myself as entitled.