Intellectual Foundation Quotes

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

I had an excellent Ivy League education, and it gave me a long view of things.

No educated man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.

Without Greek studies there is no education.

Other countries have been founded by 'accidents of force.' America is a creation of thought.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung.

'Orthodoxy' is the seminal book of ideas in my life. That book I've read more than any other book. It's the spinal column that leads up to my brain and informs the way I think. Flannery O'Connor is my favorite American writer.