"The replacement of the New Dealers by the car dealers" (Adlai Stevenson on the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nixon 4
"If you send your son to the colleges of today, you will create the Executioner of tomorrow." From the right wing publication "Freeman" 1951. 14
"Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. The heart of the matter...is that the professional man lives off ideas, not for them." R. Hoffstader, "The Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 25-27
"Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates the evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole [a system]."
"It is this element--the fact that ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside of the process itself--which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, or the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end. The goal here is external and not self-determined, whereas the intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own...established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual's attitude toward ideas--qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety."
"The figure of the school teacher may well be taken as a central symbol in any modern society. The teacher is the first professional representative of the life of the mind who enters into the experience of most children; and the feeling the child entertains toward the teacher, his awareness of the communities regard for the teacher, are focal points in the formation of his early, rudimentary notions about learning." R. Hofstadter. 309
"Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt." R. Niehbuhr
"The role of the is inherited from the office of the cleric: it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension. Socrates, when he said the unexamined life is not worth living, struck the essence of it."
"...the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast of its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas...The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties....the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions?"
"...In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, in not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practical business of life." 33
"Intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. 'Let us admit the case of the conservative,' John Dewey wrote, 'If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place" 45
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