“Prophet just means intellectual.”
Interview by Harry Kreisler, March 22, 2002 http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Chomsky/chomsky-con4.html.
Quotes 2000s, 2002
Context: Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.
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Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928Related quotes
“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”
Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
Context: We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only.
When asked whether he considered himself (and Carl) to be "intellectual", 2002
Definitions and objects
“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.”
"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)
"On Ambiguity" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
“Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.”
Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 28
“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Source: The Songs Of David Bowie
