Intellectuals Quotes

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“inside the angry man a fearful one cowered.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“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 – A Fascinating Portrait of Brilliant and Dangerous Minds

“There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“In spring 1970 a belated attempt was made by the far left in France to Europeanize Mao’s violent Cultural Revolution. The movement was called Proletarian Left and Sartre agreed to join it; in theory he became editor-in-chief of its journal, La Cause du peuple, largely to prevent the police from confiscating it. Its aims were violent enough even for Sartre’s taste – it called for factory managers to be imprisoned and parliamentary deputies to be lynched – but it was crudely romantic, childish and strongly anti-intellectual.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Russell was a gifted expositor. An early work of his had explained the work of Leibnitz, whom he always revered.6 His brilliant survey, A History of Western Philosophy (1946), is the ablest thing of its kind ever written and was deservedly a best-seller all over the world.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“Proudhon was an anti-dogmatist: ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote, ‘after we have demolished all the [religious] dogmatism a priori, let us not of all things attempt to instil another kind of dogma into the people … let us not make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance.’ Marx hated this line.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity

“He did not use the word ‘brainwash’, but he wrote: ‘Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to ‘consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State’. ‘For being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it. It will have all they have and will be all they are.’ Again, this anticipates Mussolini’s central Fascist doctrine: ‘Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity