Intellectual Quotes (page 23)
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You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying
your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why
even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars.
But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as
your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don’t move, wrap your
arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my hands
are dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the...
Jean-Paul Sartre
I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay",...
Philip Pullman
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in...
Leo Tolstoy
I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically...
Don DeLillo
Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.
Theodor Adorno
