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We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

— Susan Sontag

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Intelligence

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.

Death Kit (1967)

From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction.

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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)

Attribution

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