Monica

“The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ‘I feel too superior to hate.’ ‘I love myself too much to hate anybody.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged. And he did it, moreover, in an entirely new way, by the systematic cult of rudeness. He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“When I surrender to prolonged entreaties to accept an offer, repeated over and over again, I do so for the sake of peace and quiet rather than my own advantage. However much it may have cost the giver, he is actually in my debt-for it costs me more.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky