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Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate

— Perry Anderson Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2007)

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More quotes by Perry Anderson

Great men have foibles for which they can be forgiven; including an occasional failure to see where their greatness lies, or what might diminish it.

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)

The greater pleasures of reading the LRB are thus paid for in a more erratic and limited horizon.

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)

With the euro, that form of pressure has gone.

Putin’s control of the media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive.

The – now shop-worn – label of ‘magical realism’ is customarily applied to Márquez’s novels. It has never fitted Vargas Llosa, who disavows the adjective.

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Perry Anderson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.