Nut Meg’s Reviews > Anti-Intellectualism in American Life > Status Update

"Furious menaces and bellowing exaggeration take the place of calm and dignified debate...Congress attains the unenviable fame of being the most helpless, disorderly, and inefficient legislative body which can be found in the civilized world." Lol some things never change

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat."

"The literature of the extreme right also shows a significant continuity in style-- indicative of the degree to which the pattern of fundamentalism has become the pattern of militant nationalism."

"The effect of the evangelical impulse, of the search for a new religious style to reach the people and save souls, was to dilute the strong intellectual and educational traditions of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists."

"The Awakeners were not the first to disparage the virtues of mind, but they quickened anti-intellectualism"

"As their legatee, the modern intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristocrat to the animus of puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulnerability of the priest to anticlericalism and popular assaults on hierarchy."

"The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties."

"In so far as Anti-intellectualism becomes articulate enough to be traced historically or widespread enough to make itself felt in contemporary controversy, it has to have spokesmen who are at least to some degree competent. These spokesmen are in the main neither the uneducated nor the unintellectual, but rather the marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked or embittered intellectuals"

"Right-wing hostility to universities was in part a question of deference and social status, but in part also a reflection of the old Jacksonian dislike of specialists and experts."

"Anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it"