intelligence quotes

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

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

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

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.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

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 incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

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.

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

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

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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

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

There is no sin except stupidity.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

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

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

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

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

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

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

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

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.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

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

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.

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

God gave you a brain. Do the best you can with it. And you don’t have to be Einstein, but Einstein was mentally tough. He believed what he believed. And he worked out things. And he argued with people who disagreed with him. But I’m sure he didn’t call everybody jerks.

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

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

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

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Look, the American people are smart.

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.

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.

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

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

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

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