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:
“I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.”
—Kate Chopin (1851–1904)
“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“I sometimes wonder whether, in the still, sleepless hours of the night, the consciences of ... professional gossips do not stalk them. I myself believe in a final reckoning, when we shall be held accountable for our misdeeds. Do they? If so, they have cause to worry over many scoops that brought them a day’s dubious laurels and perhaps destroyed someone’s peace forever.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)