{"quotes":[{"text":"I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! More culture! Read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...","author":"Roberto Bolaño","tags":["boredom","criticism","intellectual","intellectualism","reading","writing"],"id":6736,"author_id":"Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o"},{"text":"Silence is the most expensive to buy.","author":"Ljupka Cvetanova","tags":["aphorism","common-people","corruption-politics","democracy","intellectualism","politician","politics","quote","silence","stand-up","stand-up-for-what-is-right","stand-up-for-yourself","vote-for-the-truth","voters-and-voting"],"id":7117,"author_id":"Ljupka+Cvetanova"},{"text":"The problem arises when a society respects its scholars lesser and lesser and replaces intellectualism with anti-intellectualism. Such society forces the most intellectual members of its, toward alienation and instead develops populism and irrationalism and then calls it anti-elitism. On the other hand, scholars, due to being undermined by the society, find any effort hopeless and isolate themselves into their work. For a scholar, personally, nothing changes because the scholar always is a scholar no matter having someone to share the knowledge with or not, but the true problem forms in the most ordinary sections of the society, which eventually creates an opportunity for propaganda, conspiracy theories, rhetoric, and bogus.","author":"Kambiz Shabankare","tags":["alienation","anti-elitism","anti-intellectualism","bogus","conspiracy","conspiracy-theories","intellectual","intellectualism","irrationalism","knowledge","problem","propaganda","respect","rhetoric","scholar","scholars","society","undermined"],"id":9115,"author_id":"Kambiz+Shabankare"},{"text":"Reading . . . Is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.","author":"Jorge Luis Borges","tags":["intellectualism","reading"],"id":10777,"author_id":"Jorge+Luis+Borges"},{"text":"The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.","author":"Richard Hofstadter","tags":["anti-intellectualism","history","intellectual","intellectualism","politics","politics-of-the-united-states","united-states-history"],"id":27703,"author_id":"Richard+Hofstadter"},{"text":"When You Live Life Too Early, You Learn Life Too Late.","author":"O. S. Hickman","tags":["adolescence","adulthood","advice","fast","growing-up","intellectualism","key-to-a-happy-life","lesson","life","philosophy","stability","wisdom","young-adult"],"id":36686,"author_id":"O.+S.+Hickman"},{"text":"Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.","author":"Evelyn Underhill","tags":["idealism","intellectualism","mysticism"],"id":37117,"author_id":"Evelyn+Underhill"},{"text":"As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.","author":"Max Weber","tags":["belief","intellectualism","nature","significance"],"id":44027,"author_id":"Max+Weber"},{"text":"Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance.","author":"Suzy Kassem","tags":["bridges","build-bridges","corruption","democracy","educate","education","elections","ignorance","intellectualism","invest","knowledge","leader","leaders","leadership","library","moral","morality","peacemaker","politician","politics","president","presidential","presidential-elections","public-education","ruler","scholar","school","schools","suzy-kassem","values","vote","wall","walls","weapons","wisdom"],"id":64266,"author_id":"Suzy+Kassem"},{"text":"One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["academia","education","ideas","intellectualism","life","philosophy"],"id":76540,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":55,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}