Virtues

"The hand that follows intellect can achieve."

"I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow."

"Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended."

"To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak."

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."

"The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one's thoughts is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word 'we'. And when the light of the intelligence grows dim, it is not very long before the love of good becomes lost."

"There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it."

"Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions."

"The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question “Is what she says true?”"

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity — a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied — and the world will pass beyond our understanding."

"It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains."

"Intelligence… is the worst predator of all: there can never be a defense against, or escape from, a game-changing new life form that is more intelligent than anything preceding it."

"All power corrupts, brain power being no exception. As it enlarged over millions of years, the human brain eventually became big enough to constitute a formidable weapon of mass destruction."

"Your inner body is not solid but spacious. It is not your physical form but the life that animates the physical form. It is the intelligence that created and sustains the body, simultaneously coordinating hundreds of different functions of such extraordinary complexity that the human mind can only understand a tiny fraction of it. When you become aware of it, what is really happening is that the intelligence is becoming aware of itself. It is the elusive “life” that no scientist has ever found because the consciousness that is looking for it is it."

"The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self interest, and it is extremely shortsighted. Most politicians and business people are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is shortlived and always turns out to be eventually self defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence unites."

"Until now, human intelligence, which is no more than a minute aspect of universal intelligence, has been distorted and misused by the ego. I call that “intelligence in the service of madness.” Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Using that intelligence for building and stockpiling atom bombs is insane or at best extremely unintelligent. Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. This intelligent stupidity, for which one could find countless obvious examples, is threatening our survival as a species."

"The three greatest mistakes that can be made [are] lack of intelligence, lack of resolution, or lack of responsibility."

"Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

"Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity."

"A man's intelligence comes from god."

"Strength cannot keep pace with intelligence."

"We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."

"Intelligence is too subtle an attribute to be inferred from appearance."

"You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance."

"Intelligence over appearance && impact over income."

"So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity and dullness; while personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether. Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so."

"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."

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

"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."

"Every thing connected with intellect is permanent."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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