This is my best argument for the study of hip hop culture, and for the intellectual examination and self-criticism that it provokes.

NPR: Author Comes to Hip-Hop Music's Defense

Apparently prodded by the once-great Bruce Bartlett, little-known Bentley College economics professor Scott Sumner is the latest self-proclaimed intellectual in the world of tenure to take on the notion of a gold-defined dollar.

FORBES: Scott Sumner, Gold, the Dollar, and Anti-intellectualism

That trait comes from a combination of bravery including of the physical sort intellectual self-confidence, and a bedrock value system, rooted in the heart as much as the mind.

WSJ: Ed Koch: A Mayor and His City

It starts with having the humility to be self-aware of your own limitations, followed by the intellectual curiosity to ask the right questions and actively listen to input, and concluding with the belief and optimism that something better is always possible.

FORBES: How an Entrepreneur Can 'Get Lucky' in a Startup

The Renaissance and the Reformation boosted mankind's intellectual and cultural self-confidence.

ECONOMIST: Heaven on earth

The leaders of the growing labour movement were exactly the kind of self-educated men who prided themselves on a fierce intellectual independence from ready-made doctrine.

ECONOMIST: Cultural history

Like their male counterparts, the women of this exhibition adhered to the Surrealist notion of accidental discovery, bucking bourgeois culture in favor of intellectual freedom and self-discovery.

WSJ: In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists

To paraphrase the question, Tertullian asks what relationship exists between the world of revealed religion in which God's self-manifestation is the ultimate source of knowledge and the free intellectual inquiry of Greek philosophy.

ECONOMIST: Judaism and the rise of Christianity

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

CNN: 'A Time For Choosing'