I don’t ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

If you would take, you must first give, this is the beginning of intelligence.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had.

Power is competence.

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

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

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

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

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

Wit is educated insolence.

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.

I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn’t have to translate.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

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.‘

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

The alliance in Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most important developments on the contemporary political scene.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

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

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

I have no idols. I admire work, dedication and competence.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

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

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

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

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.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

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.

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

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.