“Academic life has become more professionalised. They write for each other, not for the general reader. Academic political philosophy ­today, for example, has zero influence on the practice of politics. I doubt now whether any politician could name a leading academic philosopher. No one would know who they were.”

— John Gray

“...intellectuals are not professionals denatured by their fawning service to an extremely flawed power, but—to repeat—are intellectuals with an alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak the truth to power.”

— Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual