intelligence quotes

The fact is, I was never too bright in school. I ain’t ashamed of it, though. I mean, how much do school principals make a month?

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

Intelligent people should learn from their experiences. With people on the street, the bad experience has beaten them.

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.

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 what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.

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

Be smarter than other people, just don’t tell them so.

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

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.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty clever. But there’s a lot that you hone in on when you finish your education.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

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

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.‘

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

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 narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

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

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

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.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

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

Even Gaddafi’s adversaries assure us that he stood out for his intelligence as a student; he was expelled from high-school for his anti-monarchic activities. He managed to enroll in another high-school and later graduated in law at the University of Benghazi at the age of 21.

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

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

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.

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

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

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

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

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

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

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

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.

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

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.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

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.

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.

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?

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

My mother’s love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

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.

I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.

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.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.

I’m a meathead. I can’t help it, man. You’ve got smart people and you’ve got dumb people.