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

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

I came to California and got signed at a young age. And it’s not like you see in the movies, where you start rubbing shoulders with Timbaland and Pharrell, and you become a giant pop star.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

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

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

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

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 remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, ‚Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.‘

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

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?

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

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it’s less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

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 Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

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

The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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.

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

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

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.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

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.

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.‘

And now, of course this is another thing I didn’t count on, that now as the governor of the state of California, I am selling California worldwide. You see that? Selling.

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

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.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

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.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.

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

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

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

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

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

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

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

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

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.

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.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.

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.

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

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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

I believe in that old adage that ‚as goes California, so goes the country.‘

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the ‚Age War.‘ The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.