8 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky quotes on intellectuals

189. Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.

205. Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to any literate person but often maddeningly simple-minded. The 'Chomsky problem' is to explain how these two fit together. --Paul Robinson/New York Times, February 25, 1979 [187]

229. Marxist intellectuals can and do convince themselves to subordinate mind and ethics to a larger goal or distant cause that frequently slips out of sight. Anarchist intellectuals are less susceptible to this logic. To use the language of historical materialism, it is no accident that currently an anarchist, Noam Chomsky, is the most energetic critic of intellectuals apologizing for American foreign policy. --Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 1987 [210]

233. Chomsky is an irresistible example of the quality problem that besets the market for academic public intellectuals. --Richard Posner, 2001 [214]

260. Noam Chomsky: He's really an interventionist - and also completely clueless. --Justin Raimondo, January 18, 2002 [241]

261. In fact, Chomsky's influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult - as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. --David Horowitz, September 26, 2001 [242]

265. Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. --Keith Windschuttle, May 2003 [246]

285. When Noam Chomsky was merely the most original, arresting, and widely talked-about linguistic theorist in America, he was never referred to as a leading American intellectual. That came only after he expressed his outrage over American involvement in the war in Vietnam, about which he knew nothing, since he read The Nation instead of Parade. It was the outrage that gained him entry into that 'charming aristocracy,' to borrow the words of Catulle Mendes. Or as Marshall McLuhan once put it, 'Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.' --Tom Wolfe, December 19, 2005 [266]