"The magic formula of 'race, class and gender' ... has replaced thought in many intellectual circles." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell “The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated.” -- Robert Nozick (1986) "Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of our times that to so many of the self-righteously self-deluded, the more immediate threat to our survival is 'global warming'." -- Robert Bidinotto "The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'." -- "Assumptions of Power" by Stephen Cox, Reason magazine, March, 1993
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell "Having imagined a world in which each individual has the same probability of success as anyone else, intellectuals have been shocked and outraged that the real world is nowhere close to that ideal. Vast amounts of time and resources have been devoted to trying to figure out what is stopping this ideal from being realized -- as if there was ever any reason to expect it to be." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "When Western countries in the past were as poor as Third World countries are today, these Western countries nevertheless had one big advantage: There was no large and influential class of the intelligentsia to impede their progress with unsubstantiated theories and counterproductive propaganda." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool." --Dr. Thomas Sowell |
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool." -- Eric Blair, aka George Orwell
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." --Teddy Roosevelt
"The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers -- and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them. … The fallacies and contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed and refuted time and time again, in the nineteenth century as well as today. This did not and does not stop anyone; it is not an issue of economics, but of morality. The intellectuals and the so-called idealists were determined to make socialism work. How? By that magic means of all irrationalists: somehow." -- Ayn Rand, HERE
"...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity. " -- Ayn Rand
"It's the Intellectual's Curse. What causes people to be intellectuals is a disposition to think that abstractions and concepts are more real than actual reality - so they become more afraid of the hypothetical consequences of the abstractions in their brains than by concrete threats in the real world." -- Jack Wheeler
"Never allow anyone who's never worked in the real world, who could only get a government job or teaching job, tell you how to run your life -- or how to think about it." -- Dan Skinner
"The obsession with the pixilated versions of big pictures, with trees instead of forests and with the consideration of every barbaric viewpoint of every primitive culture on every continent on every issue is what the self-congratulatory intellectuals consider to be the primary sign of the 'intelligence' or 'advanced thinking' they demand of candidates and office holders, nomatter how indecisive, ineffectual and ridiculous such 'paralysis from never-ending analysis' makes them." -- Rick Gaber
"All the enemies of capitalism act as if its elimination would have no ill consequences for our lives. In the classroom, on television, at the movies, we are continually presented a picture of what a perfect world of bliss we would enjoy if we could just get rid of those who make a living through owning, speculating, and amassing wealth. For hundreds of years, in fact, the intellectual classes have demanded the expropriation and even the extermination of capitalistic expropriators. Since ancient times, the merchant and his trade have been considered ignoble. In fact, their absence would reduce us to barbarism and utter poverty." -- Lew Rockwell
"Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries." -- Ayn Rand, "For The New Intellectual,"For The New Intellectual
"In the market economy the production and distribution of goods and services is determined by the decisions of entrepreneurs, and this fact has generated much wrath on the part of many members of society, especially intellectuals, and especially those in the social sciences and the humanities. ... Economic affairs in the market economy may be directed by entrepreneurs, but consumers are the ultimate decision-makers." -- Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Today, in the Twenty-First Century, an age of jet aircraft, personal computers, wireless telecommunications, laser surgery, and incipient space travel, the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages." --George Reisman
"Intellectuals love Jefferson and hate markets, and intellectuals write most of the books. Intellectuals often think that they should, for the benefit of mankind, act as fiduciaries for the clods who don't have to be intellectuals, and I suspect that has to do with [why historians love Jefferson and not Hamilton, even though Hamilton's vision of America's commercial future was vastly more accurate than Jefferson's]." -- John Steele Gordon
"It would be devastating to the egos of the intelligentsia to realize, much less admit, that businesses have done more to reduce poverty than all the intellectuals put together. Ultimately it is only wealth that can reduce poverty and most of the intelligentsia have no interest whatever in finding out what actions and policies increase the national wealth. They certainly don't feel any 'obligation' to learn economics ..." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields." -- Thomas Sowell
"Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored." -- Thomas Sowell
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us noble and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Celebrated Historian Paul Johnson
"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time." -- F. A. Hayek
"Machan shines as he exposes embarrassing contradictions of egalitarianism. Example: 'If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet, striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality.'" -- from Jim Powell's Review of Private Rights and PublicIllusions by Tibor Machan.
"...the question becomes, are you going to have everyone play by the same rules, or are you going to try to rectify the shortcomings, errors and failures of the entire cosmos? Because those things are wholly incompatible. If you're going to have people play by the same rules, that can be enforced with a minimum amount of interference with people's freedom. But if you're going to try to make the entire cosmos right and just, somebody has got to have an awful lot of power to impose what they think is right on an awful lot of other people. What we've seen, particularly in the 20th century, is that putting that much power in anyone's hands is enormously dangerous." -- Thomas Sowell, in an interview in Salon11-10-99
"I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"The vast majority of intellectuals don’t really originate any ideas, but they peddle ideas that other people have originated." -- Thomas Sowell
"Bad and discredited ideas, it seems, never die. Neither do they fade away. Instead, they keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla in the old Japanese movies." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"The most brilliant individuals -- individuals whose intelligence far outstrips the rest of us -- can be completely wrong in their factual appraisals of the world." -- Alan Ebenstein
"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men." -- Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God." -- Thomas Sowell
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across." -- Julian Simon
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
"I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it." -- Milton Friedman
"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns." -- Ayn Rand
| "For decades, the left has dominated the intelligentsia: the media, the universities, and the other institutions that provide credentials for 'experts' -- another term Al Gore has been harping on. This leads the left to act as if the latest consensus among its favored experts--whether it be the superiority of socialized medicine or the imminent threat of global warming -- must be what every 'rational' and well-informed person thinks, because it is the consensus of the elite. "Thus 'reason,' as Al Gore uses the term, refers to the ability of the leftist elite to impose its conventional dogmas on the national debate, without the need to persuade or convince others." -- Robert Tracinski |
"President Bush, by his very persona, triggers the very wellsprings of anger and resentment on the part of the secular fundamentalists who dominate the contemporary Left. A large segment of the American intelligentsia and its hangers-on has found an object wholly outside their framework of affection. People who obtained their status and income partially from the ability to speak articulately, and master a body of learning, find it troubling when one who does not flaunt his reading of books and newspapers and does not wield a large vocabulary of eloquently-spoken words rises above them in status. It is an insult to the personal values they have embraced, and on whose rightness their own sense of self-worth depends. ... His open Christian faith is an affront to their pretentious embrace of denatured religion, agnosticism or atheism. That such a man should be the head of state for the political entity they regard as the vehicle for transformation of humanity is both profoundly embarrassing and infuriating to them." -- Thomas Lifson
"It appears that some among our intellectual elite, having finally achieved the giant government they've always sought, are finally realizing that it can -- and WILL -- all fall into the 'wrong' hands. The rest of them are in complete denial of the fact that the monstrosity they built could be used for purposes diametrically opposed to those they intended, and they even seem congenitally incapable of ever questioning the wisdom of giving so much power to government in the first place." -- Rick Gaber
"It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, ‘We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.’ This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." -- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964
"...pathetic 'intellectuals' demonstrate how ridiculous they are by confusing psychopathic control freaks such as Hitler and Mussolini with warm-hearted, easy-going live-and-let-livers such as Ronald Reagan. Only hate-filled psychotics as intensely uptight and humorless as Hitler and Mussolini themselves could be so psychologically incapable of telling the difference." -- Rick Gaber
"For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant." --Dave Barry
"My sociology class consisted primarily of my professor coming up every day with a new way of saying, 'Sociology is a science. I know it's a science, and I'm telling you it's a science. It really, really is a science! Please say it's a science, or I'll cry." -- Bob Draper
"Unfortunately, since at least the time when Plato wrote his famous philosophical dialogue The Republic, those in business have gotten a bad rap. This was due, in part, to the fact that the writers of such tracts were usually intellectuals, artists, or members of some other group that had its own agenda and an incentive to place its own calling on top of the heap. Plato went to great lengths to suggest that perhaps something like a philosopher-king would be a great model for political rule. He also spilt much ink indicting trade and business and wealth creation, and for hundreds of years this mantra was repeated by those in the humanities, and continues in a big way today. Very sadly the human species has had too many thinkers who were idealists of the worst sort, placing before us impossible goals to strive for while demeaning the possible and desirable ones. ... And it is really quite unjust, when you come to think of it -- with all those diligent people in business, breaking their necks to produce what millions of us want, working ceaselessly to help us all prosper, and they are routinely put down, lumped together with the relatively few crooks among them." -- Dr. Tibor R. Machan
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced." -- Ayn Rand
"The intelligentsia congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned ignorant to realize, or too damned stubborn to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code available to mankind (it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion." -- Rick Gaber
"That kind of wishful thinking is something that intellectuals are particularly prone to -- because they wouldn't be intellectuals in the first place if they didn't believe that it is clever political decisions which make good things happen and stupid ones which make bad things happen. ... The best comment on the Chatham House report was that of the British defense secretary, John Reid: 'The idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you, is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground.' Or at least every kid who's not an intellectual." -- James Bowman
"... So here we get the two essentials of Nazism: the rejection of reason and the mind in favor of the worship of brute emotion, and the elevation of the collective over the individual. What, then, distinguishes the ideas of the modern intellectuals from the philosophy of the Nazis? The addition of an altruist twist. The Nazis were certainly pro-self-sacrifice, because they advocated (and enforced) the sacrifice of the individual self to the collective aggrandizement of the race. But the modern intellectuals declare that they are even more altruistic because they want to sacrifice our own race to other races." -- Robert Tracinski, HERE
"In short, altruism requires the systematic sacrifice of the good and valuable for the vicious and the worthless. ... But it is impossible to sell people on total, unadulterated sacrifice. It is too glaring a contradiction to tell them to find value in the destruction of values -- so it is necessary to pretend that it is not really destruction. The facts must be distorted, hidden, or declared to be irrelevant. Whatever the method, altruism requires and sanctions a war on reality. ... Philosophically, this war is manifested in the attempts to base morality on any bizarre fantasy philosophers can dream up." -- Robert Tracinski, "Altruism's War on Reality", HERE
Here's an example of how the blind insanity of American "intellectuals" enable and facilitate the most unspeakable of evils.
"There is an ancient slogan that applies to our present position: 'The king is dead -- long live the king!' We can say, with the same dedication to the future: 'The intellectuals are dead -- long live the intellectuals!' -- and then proceed to fulfill the responsibility which that honorable title had once implied." -- Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual
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| Also see: Observations on Journalists, |on Academics and Schooling, |
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