History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don’t use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
Intellectual
Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, ‘morality.’ Morality is the ‘idea’ of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an ‘intellectual’ man, a so-called independent, a ‘freethinker.’
Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
The one man other than my father who made the most lasting impression was an uncle, Serge B. Benson. He taught me in three different classes – but above all, he taught me lessons in moral, physical, and intellectual courage that I have tried to apply in later life.
Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.
If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.
All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers.