317 Intelligence Quotes

I am quite sure that very few of the so-called Reds in Spain were really Communists. We were badly deceived, for, had I known the real state of affairs, I would never have allowed our aircraft to bombard and destroy a starving population and at the same time re-establish the Spanish clergy in all their horrible privileges. (10th February 1945)

It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

An unbending and absolute acceptance of any idea is a sure sign of a small mind, no matter the greatness of intellect possesed by the one accepting that idea.

The curse of the intelligent man is that he will always find himself surrounded by the ignorant. The measure of the intelligent man is determined by his tolerance toward them.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

I hate people who think it's clever to take drugs... like custom officers.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.

Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.

Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Oh, I'm not a true genius. I'm a near genius. I would say I'm a short genius. I'd rather be tall and normal than a short genius.

Fifteen referees. I want fifteen referees to be at this fight because there ain't no one man who can keep up with the pace I'm gonna set except me. There's not a man alive who can whup me. I'm too fast. I'm too smart. I'm too pretty. I should be a postage stamp. That's the only way I'll ever get licked.

Libby was advised by the vice president of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the CIA.

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch. But it's an article of faith among those with no military experience that the Iraqi military is low-hanging fruit.

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

Common sense is genius in homespun.

'Looks like you need a little head.'

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

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

My favourite definition of 'Intellectual' is: 'A person whose education surpasses their intelligence.'

The intelligence of the planet is constant, and the population is growing.

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

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.

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

Die liebenswurdigste der Frauen wird immer auch die schonste sein.

If you are not very clever, you should be conciliatory.

And I'll tell you something too. That's starting to annoy me about UFOs, the fact that they cross galaxies or universes to visit us, and always end up in places like : Fyffe fucking Alabama. Maybe these aren't super-intelligent beings, you know what I mean?

All of humanity now has the option to 'make it' successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.

'I have this theory about smart people. If you're smart, you're either the only person in your family who's smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.'

I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.

The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

La passion fait souvent un fou du plus habile homme, et rend souvent les plus sots habiles.

Chacun dit du bien de son coeur et personne n'en ose dire de son esprit.

[On Paul Gascoigne:] 'I once said Gazza's IQ was less than his shirt number and he asked me: 'What's an IQ?''

This is like the WWF for smart people.

No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool.

He (Otto Skorzeny) also saved Mussolini...and Hitler hoped that Skorzeny would do the same in Tehran, but he didn't succeed at it.

Luck is important for many professions, and moreso, for that of an intelligence agent.

The group that was headed by me...we succeeded in discovering about four hundred agents who were connected with German intelligence...they were Generals, Ministers, Deputies of Parliament, and other high stated (ranking) people.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

Baravelli, you've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it.

That kid's so smart, he could be the fifth Marx Brother.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Heath Ledger is frighteningly young and frighteningly intelligent. He's a very hard worker, very devoted [and] not a bit spoiled or pretentious.

For some time he had been using captured Russian agents to communicate false intelligence to the Soviet armies, using their own codes and their own wireless sets; and it would have been entirely possible for him to enter into detailed communication with the enemy by this means without anyone being the wiser. Be that as it may, like a perfect Civil Servant, he went, leaving not a trace, his files totally destroyed.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence- beginning with one's own.

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

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.

If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.

In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

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

The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

No one in our age was cleverer than Keynes nor made less attempt to conceal it.

Em geral, nos outros, os Portugueses, so comecamos a ser idiotas - quando chegamos a idade da razao. Em pequenos temos todos uma pontinha de genio.

No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.

There can't be two smart peoples in the world. We're going to win the war, so only the Aryan race will stand.

The enemy holds every trump card, covering all areas with long-range air patrols and using location methods against which we still have no warning...The enemy knows all our secrets and we know none of his.

'It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh,' said the Scarecrow thoughtfully, 'for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.'

You know how I'm smart? I got people around me who know more than I do.

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.

It was only when Bormann's disappearance became a matter for serious conjecture, and intelligence agents began to go into the ugly details, that an incredible episode in Hitler's life came to light. This explained exactly how Martin Bormann was able to gather into his hands all the strings required to make Hitler dance to his tune.

She was a great heroine to many young women of my age. She was a heroine for her independence and her courage in speaking out in defence of lost causes and for her ability to combine great personal glamour with a ferocious intelligence.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.