Intellectuals Quotes

“inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ‘I feel too superior to hate.’ ‘I love myself too much to hate anybody.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State,”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau’s political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Shelley’s love was deep, sincere, passionate, indeed everlasting-but it was always changing its object.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“It is a curious delusion of intellectuals, from Rousseau onwards, that they can solve the perennial difficulties of human education at a stroke, by setting up a new system.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“The truth is, even the most superficial inquiry into Marx’s use of evidence forces one to treat with scepticism everything he wrote which relies on factual data. He can never be trusted.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Ibsen was saying to humanity: ‘Be yourselves!’ Yet in this letter he was in effect admitting that to be oneself involved the sacrifice of others. Personal liberation was at bottom self-centred and heartless.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Though Rousseau writes about the General Will in terms of liberty, it is essentially an authoritarian instrument, an early adumbration of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. Laws made under the General Will must, by definition, have moral authority. ‘The people making laws for itself cannot be unjust.’ ‘The General Will is always righteous.’ Moreover, provided the State is ‘well-intentioned’ (i.e., its long-term objectives are desirable) interpretation of the General Will can safely be left to the leaders since ‘they know well that the General Will always favours the decision most conducive to the public interest.’ Hence any individual who finds himself in opposition to the General Will is in error: ‘When the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this simply proves that I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the General Will, was not so.’ Indeed, ‘if my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and I should not therefore have been free.’ We are here almost in the chilly region of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’. Rousseau”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The General Will is always righteous.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Karl Heinzen, who retaliated with a memorable portrait of the angry little man. He found Marx ‘intolerably dirty’, a ‘cross between a cat and an ape’; with ‘dishevelled coal-black hair and dirty yellow complexion’. It was, he said, impossible to say whether his clothes and skin were naturally mud-coloured or just filthy. He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, ‘spitting out spurts of wicked fire’; he had a habit of saying: ‘I will annihilate you.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“One modern academic lists Rousseau’s shortcomings as follows: he was a ‘masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Rousseau’s ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘is at root dependent on politics.’ Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The evil of competition, as he saw it, which destroys man’s inborn communal sense and encourages all his most evil traits, including his desire to exploit others, led Rousseau to distrust private property, as the source of social crime.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged. And he did it, moreover, in an entirely new way, by the systematic cult of rudeness. He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“indeed the famous critic Jules Lemaître called this instant apotheosis of Rousseau ‘one of the strongest proofs ever provided of human stupidity’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“As for Lassalle, he became the victim of Marx’s most brutal anti-Semitic and racial sneers: he was ‘Baron Itzig’, ‘the Jewish Nigger’, ‘a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and cheap jewels’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau’s iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“There are many passages in his Confessions and still more in his letters which stress the child element. Many of those who had dealings with him-Hume, for instance-saw him as a child. They began by thinking of him as a harmless child, who could be managed, and discovered to their cost they were dealing with a brilliant and savage delinquent.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Rousseau’s warmest affection went to animals. Boswell records a delightful scene of him playing with his cat and his dog Sultan. He gave Sultan (and his predecessor, Turc) a love he could not find for humans, and the howling of this dog, whom he brought with him to London, almost prevented him from attending the special benefit performance Garrick had set up for him at Drury Lane.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“His fifth innovation, then, on the very eve of the Industrial Revolution, was to develop the elements of a critique of capitalism, both in the preface to his play Narcisse and in his Discours sur l’inégalité, by identifying property and the competition to acquire it as the primary cause of alienation.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“The kind of facts which did not interest Marx were the facts to be discovered by examining the world and the people who live in it with his own eyes and ears. He was totally and incorrigibly deskbound. Nothing on earth would get him out of the library and the study.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“the axis of Rousseau’s ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of all children.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky