Intelligence

"Äly hoi älä jätä, ymmärrys älä petäǃ (Nivala, Northern Bothnia) (KRA)"

"You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble."

"[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow."

"Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words."

"Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing."

"An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always."

"She should be my counsellor, But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs Impulses from a deeper source than hers; And there are motions, in the mind of man, That she must look upon with awe."

"There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister. Most of them are making a living somewhere. Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power."

"Clever men often have intellectual blind spots. And extremely clever men—perhaps those who are the cleverest of all—have the biggest blind spots when they depart from their areas of expertise."

"Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a château does to its owner."

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

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

"Government resting upon the will and universal suffrage of the people has no anchorage except in the people's intelligence."

"Perhaps, in spite of her brilliance, she’s too young to realize the hostility of the world toward intelligence."

"She had found the answer to her affliction—conformity! She had already learned to conceal her intelligence. So many of us break our hearts before we learn that."

"We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it—the intelligentsia—unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest."

"It is an article of passionate faith among 'politically correct' biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway."

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."

"We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name."

"We are just one of a number of species which inhabit this planet even if we are the most intelligent. But then other species have not created nuclear weapons, started wars where millions have been killed, or engaged in discrimination against the races of their sub-species, all of which humankind has done. So who is to say which one is the most “intelligent?”"

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

"Ultimately, it would certainly be desirable to have an algorithm for the selection of an intelligence, such that any trained researcher could determine whether a candidate's intelligence met the appropriate criteria. At present, however, it must be admitted that the selection (or rejection) of a candidate's intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgment than of a scientific assessment."

"Intelligence is that faculty, of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered"

"Oh, I could tell you, but you're far too clever to listen. That said, we're never too old to be students of our own behaviors, Jean-Luc."

"Keen intelligence is two-edged, It may be used constructively or destructively like a knife, either to cut the boil of ignorance, or to decapitate one's self. Intelligence is rightly guided only after the mind has acknowledged the inescapability of spiritual law."

"An ounce of prudence is worth a pound of cleverness."

"Cleverness has often—in our world—only a posthumous good fortune. Clever people, who have nothing but their cleverness, may be remembered as superior, but they weren't allowed to feel it at the time. Stupid people can say the most devastating things!"

"Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"

"It is amazing how oppressive is the cleverness of some people, as if it were quite a duty in you to be clever too—"

"The surest way to be deceived is to think oneself more clever than others."

"The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so."

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

"People who claim there is no such thing as native intelligence are nuts."

"The intellect has only one failing, which to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience. Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his heart had borne any proportion to his brain, he had been one of the greatest men of history."

"When the best way to the Governor’s favour was to be intelligent, intelligence would become the fashion."

"Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table."

"I believe in "intelligence," and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quantified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like."

"I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again."

"All the branches of Christianity suffer by the fact that they seem to be unable to take in the greatest contribution of the modern world to ethical theory, to wit, the concept of a moral obligation to be intelligent."

"I'll call "Society of Mind" this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes. These we'll call agents. Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies—in very special ways—this leads to true intelligence."

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

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

"It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence."

"No doubt, sulking populists in every era stay mean as weasels because they despise any form of superior intelligence except shrewdness."

"He told me that it isn't what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not."

"As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall."

"Every thing connected with intellect is permanent."

"The more you observe nature, the more you perceive that there is tremendous organization in all things. It is an intelligence so great that just by observing natural phenomena I come to the conclusion that a Creator exists."

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

"Men of limited intelligence are so exposed to boredom and this is due to their intellect’s being absolutely nothing but the medium of motives for their will. Now if at the moment there are no motives to be taken up, the will rests and the intellect takes a holiday since the one, like the other, does not become active of its own accord. The result is a terrible stagnation of all the powers of the entire man, in a word boredom. To ward off this, men now present the will with trivial motives that are merely temporary and are taken at random in order to rouse it and thus bring into action the intellect that has to interpret them."