“Intellectuals … advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. … It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.”

—  Allan Bloom

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 281.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

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Allan Bloom 29
American philosopher, classicist, and academician 1930–1992

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Context: Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them. We continually find points of contact and comparison in our own conceptions and feelings; we get to know the hidden capacities and desires of the mind, which in the ordinary peaceful course of civilised life remain unawakened.
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The earliest known appearance of this quote in print is Walter J. Savitch, Pascal: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming (1984), where it is attributed as a "remark overheard at a computer science conference". It circulated as an anonymous saying for more than ten years before attributions to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and Yogi Berra began to appear (and later still to various others).
Disputed, Misattributed

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