Professional
Some intellectuals and thinkers are marginalised because of their dissenting, radical or controversial views on a range of topics, including HIV/AIDS, climate change, evolution, alternative medicine, green energy, or third world politics. Though fashionable for a time to some, they are more widely regarded as intellectual freethinkers and dissidents whose ideas and views run against those of the mainstream. At times they are marginalised and abused, often systematically ostracized by colleagues, and in some cases their work ridiculed or banned from publication. Examples include Immanuel Velikovsky, Peter Duesberg, Susan George (political scientist), Martin Fleischman, Stanley Pons, Fred Hoyle, James Lovelock, E. F. Schumacher.
Read more about this topic: Social Exclusion
Famous quotes containing the word professional:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)