The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

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

I wasn’t very good in academics, but I could have been if I could have studied well. I was a smart kid.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

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 brain is wider than the sky.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

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

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

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.

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

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

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

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

In the ’50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

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

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

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

It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

I like learning more about people; I like to talk to people.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

I like entertaining people. I really miss it.

I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist, but I don’t like girls pretending to be stupid because it’s easier.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

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

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.