“There are very few intellectual elites and those who think they are, are merely not and those who are not shows us the intellectual power of human mind. ”

“Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.”

“Intellectual empathy requires us to think within the viewpoints of others, especially those we think are wrong.”

“To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rare elite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming.”

“Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman," by which he meant that those at the top of the heap use intellectuals as a scapegoat to distract people from the societal inequities that actually affect their lives: those of wealth and power. Intellectuals are posited as both sinister and powerful, conspiratorially undermining the values of ordinary people.”

“What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.”