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:
“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)
“Many young girls are ... becoming trained nurses, whose gentle ministrations in the sick-room, skilled touch, patient watchfulness and unwearied vigils, are as great factors in the care of the sick, as are the professional physicians.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“As a scientist I’m afraid I’m a professional skeptic who doubts everything, even the certainties.”
—Karl Brown (1897–1990)