Armchair Intellectuals Quotes

O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. ~ Haruki Murakami

I think that intellectuals who end up in hell will have to read page proofs and check indexes there. ~ Edward Teller

Intellectuals ponder, philosophize, interpret, and all this is essential to our shared experience, however, to feel the warmth of what lays at our feet within all that can be felt by the heart, is in an instant more powerful than mere words, we need to feel the words, capture the essence of what we see, and revel in the tastes of nature, and let ourselves allow our hearts to sing out loud, wild, and free. ~ Mark Donnelly

Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. ~ Mark Bowden

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists. ~ Richard Engel

The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness or who make "democracy" synonymous with a republican form of government? ~ Randolph Bourne

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half. ~ Eric Hoffer

We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen. ~ Eric Hoffer

Zealots are one-trick ponies. They love nothing so much as their own cause. Don't get in their way without expecting to be hurt. ~ Patricia Briggs

My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I think academics and intellectuals are the natural enemies of imagination and intelligence. ~ Steve Merrick

The place where french-postmodernism has been really harmful is the Third World. Because Third World intellectuals are badly needed in popular movements, they can make contributions. And a lot of them is drawn away from this: antropologists, sociologists and others. They are drawn away in this arcane, and in my view, mostly meaningless discourses and are disassociated from popular struggles. And you can see the impact. They really indicate that the level of irrationality that grows out of this undermines the oportunities for doing something really significant and important. It is like consumerism because it diverts people from concentrating in a serious way and doing something about their own problems. ~ Noam Chomsky

The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about? ~ Raymond Chandler

A reader is a voyager, an armchair adventurer, travelling to different times, places, inhabiting different minds and worlds. What fun. ~ Mark Rubinstein

Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations. ~ Charles S. Maier

Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm
not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the
vulgarian. ~ Orson Welles

Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'. ~ Thomas Sowell

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life. ~ Will Self

Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. ~ Murray Rothbard

there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A school master will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in class than a […] genius. […] His task is not to produce extravagant intellectuals but good Latinists, arimeticians and sober decent folk. […] We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds always heal. […] they create their art in spite of school. Once dead and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. […] [T]ime and again the ones who are detested by their teachers […] are afterwards the ones who add to society's treasure. ~ Hermann Hesse

Kallias laughs so loudly and abruptly, I nearly topple out of the armchair. He has his hands on his knees while his whole body shakes from the force of the laughter. What the devils?

Did I break the king? ~ Tricia Levenseller

The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview. ~ Anthony Daniels

Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind's only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic. ~ William Giraldi

I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's what I'm interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want - well, all right, say it, we want cake! ~ Sinclair Lewis

The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us. ~ Eric Hoffer

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice ... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind. ~ Frank McCourt

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. ~ George Orwell

Quintana had known Tubbs since high school; Tubbs had been one of the slightly nerdy intellectuals on the edge of the popular clique, while Quintana had been metal shop and a football lineman. ~ John Sandford

Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she is heading toward something, probably an armchair. ~ Muriel Barbery

North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. ~ Barbara Demick

You're a genius! And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent. ~ Woody Allen

Tiago decided he enjoyed armchair warfare. It was so comfortable, and there were pastries. ~ Thea Harrison

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark. ~ Josiah Bancroft

What do intellectuals and opinion makers get from big government? An increasing number of cushy jobs in the bureaucracy, or in the government-subsidized sector, staffing the welfare regulatory state, and apologizing for its policies, as well as propagandizing for them among the public. To put it bluntly, intellectuals, theorists, pundits, media elites, etc. get to live a life which they could not attain on the free market, but which they can gain at taxpayer expense. ~ Murray Rothbard

I consider it a shame that most contemporary American writing seems informed more by Hemingway, the hero of adolescent boys of all ages and genders, than by the sui generis genius of letters, Faulkner. A phalanx of books about boredom in the Midwest is lauded (where the Midwest lies is a source of constant puzzlement to me, somewhere near Iowa, I presume), as are books about unexplored angst in New Jersey or couples unable to communicate in Connecticut. It was Camus who asserted that American novelists are the only ones who think they need not be intellectuals. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Internalist approaches to epistemology, I believe, have a great deal of intuitive appeal. Internalists believe that the features in virtue of which a belief is justified must somehow be internal to the agent. On some views, this amounts to the claim that these features must be accessible to introspection and armchair reflection. On others, it amounts only to the claim that they must be mental features. ~ Hilary Kornblith

Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. ~ Sue Hubbell

Relativism is one of the many crimes committed by intellectuals. It is a betrayal of reason and of humanity. ~ Karl R. Popper

Draped across an armchair lay his famous long black coat, empty now, and hollow with missing him. ~ Frank Delaney

The modern world is full of pundits, poseurs, and mall ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those come only with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist with a credit card can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an "M4gery" carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills and practicality. ~ James Wesley, Rawles

Intellectuals are rebels, not revolutionaries. ~ Cesar Vallejo

Speaking of the devil, what is Alma doing right now?"

"Well..." Sitting in her favorite armchair, Isabel craned her neck around to peer down the hallway to where she saw Alma squealing and clapping hands at their pet beagle Petey Sampson. With his tail wagging, he woof-woofed at her, and she woof-woofed right back at him. ~ Ed Lynskey

Just as political correctness finds its most avid supporters on today's university campuses, the intellectuals of earlier times generally went along with the religious establishment. He who pays the piper calls the tune. ~ David P. Clark

These self-anointed intellectuals are people who think that those who believe in God and Jesus Christ, those who 'cling to their guns and their religion,' are a lower form of animal life, while they, themselves, have no problem whatever accepting Obama as a messiah and, in the past, deifying the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Let's face it, when you kneel in a church, you're accepting that there is something greater and wiser than yourself in the universe. When, on the other hand, you kneel to a left-wing politician, you're merely emulating Monica Lewinsky. ~ Burt Prelutsky

There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men. ~ John Lukacs

People are given a false alternative: the choice between an unenlightened belief and an enlightened unbelief. Most intellectuals seem to pay homage to the second variant. ~ Eugen Drewermann