Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

It doesn’t take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Educate the masses, elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a successful nation.

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‚Well, you know: It’s secret.‘

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

If you look at the movie ‚Belly,‘ I identify with Sincere the most. I am a gangster. I love my lady to death. I’m not in the game for the wrong reasons. I’m not in the game for the glory. I’m in the game to survive so the people that I love could be straight. I’m a highly intelligent individual.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

One of the things being in politics has taught me is that men are not a reasoned or reasonable sex.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

Marty was an extraordinary person. Of all the boys I had dated, he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain. And he was always – well, making me feel that I was better than I thought I was.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

It must be the Brit in me, because I like animals.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

Dogs never bite me – just humans.

The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody’s interested in somebody who’s just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing – there is no latest thing. It’s all rubbish.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.