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"The intellectual, especially when philosophically inclined, is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind. . . . Only someone who keeps himself in some measure pure has hatred, nerves, freedom and mobility enough to oppose the world, but just because of the illusion of purity — for he lives as a 'third person' — he allows the world to triumph not merely externally, but in his innermost thoughts. . . . That intellectuals are at once beneficiaries of a bad society, and yet those on whose socially useless work it largely depends whether a society emancipated from utility is achieved — this is not a contradiction acceptable once and for all and therefore irrelevant. It gnaws incessantly at the objective quality of their work. Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child. . . .
Intelligence is a moral category."— Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), Minima Moralia (1944-47)[PDF]
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