Intellectual Background Quotes

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'

My dad was a miner, but he was very much an intellectual. He loved to read.

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

I think people are surprised when I string two sentences together. But I had a fiercely academic upbringing.

My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers.

My father came from an intellectual and studious avenue as opposed to a brawler's avenue. So I had to go further afield and I brought all kinds of unscrupulous oiks back home - earless, toothless vagabonds - to teach me the arts of the old bagarre.

I was not thinking about infinite multipliers when I was 10. But I did have a father who was a Ph.D. in commerce and finance and an intellectual man. And so I had a feeling, probably about the time I went to college, that I would try to be a scholar and teacher, but I didn't know which field.

I came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.

My education and background thoroughly inform my writing.

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought