An intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.

Agnew’s line is a populist jab at “intellectuals,” defining them not by learning but by supposed practical incompetence. The humor depends on a deliberately trivial task—parking a bicycle—to suggest that bookish expertise can be disconnected from everyday competence. In the political climate in which Agnew often attacked elites and the press, the quip functions as a rhetorical leveling device: it flatters “ordinary” know-how while casting intellectual authority as pretentious or unworldly. The reductive definition is part of the point; it caricatures a social type to score a cultural and political contrast rather than to offer a serious account of intellectual life.