Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.
Sometimes I get intimidated by people, intellectuals, because I don't have a great education. The only thing I feel helps me compete with all these people, people with degrees from Harvard, that you're thrown in with and have to work with, is that I'm grounded.
It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.
My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, 'intellectuals gone bad,' a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
