Success Quote by Harry Oppenheimer

There is a small act of defiance tucked into Oppenheimer's careful, boardroom-polished sentence: he refuses to treat "intellectual" as an embarrassing association that needs a public relations cleanse. The line reads like it was written for a room where applause depends on not sounding too clever, where political credibility is measured by proximity to "ordinary people" and distance from anyone who might complicate the message with facts, ethics, or history.

Oppenheimer, a mining magnate and liberal figure in apartheid-era South Africa, is doing two things at once. He is normalizing the presence of intellectuals in a party - not as decorative advisors, but as legitimate members - and he is preemptively swatting away the populist sneer that intellectuals are impractical, disloyal, or elitist. The phrase "certainly" concedes the charge as if it had already been leveled. "Considerable number" is deliberately bland, managerial language; it drains the topic of heat. Then the pivot lands: "by no means disposed to apologise". Not "I won't apologize", but the more patrician formulation that signals: I understand the game, and I'm declining to play it.

The subtext is class politics turned inside out. Coming from a businessman, the line also functions as an assertion that ideas are not a threat to competence, and that seriousness is not a liability. In a climate where power often demands anti-intellectual theater, Oppenheimer offers something rarer: a refusal to perform ignorance as authenticity.