Anti-intellectualism ... has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in ano….

The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of sign….

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege..

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men wit….

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas l….

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has bee….

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and f….

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else..

Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies ….

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan..

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place i….

Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rat….

The intellectual's ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of ….

In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or ….

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do..

The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche..

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesqu….