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.

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.

Six hours sleep for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool.

Stupidity is not a handicap in politics.

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.

There is no sin except stupidity.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

'Oh, yes, he thinks a lot of you. I remember his very words. 'Mr Wooster, miss' he said 'is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible but he has a heart of gold'

'When I say 'mind,'' said the blood relation, 'I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.'

I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.

I don't suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartar sauce.

[Most politicians have] brains like sparrows' nests - all shit and sticks.

You boxhead you wouldn't know. You are flat out counting past ten.

I'm not running a seminar for dullards on the other side.

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

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.

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is - so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

In the old times of which I have spoken, they desired to make all men think exactly alike. All the mechanical ingenuity of the world cannot make two clocks run exactly alike, and how are you going to make hundreds of millions of people, differing in brain and disposition, in education and aspiration, in conditions and surroundings, each clad in a living robe of passionate flesh - how are you going to make them think and feel alike? If there is an infinite god, one who made us, and wishes us to think alike, why did he give a spoonful of brains to one, and a magnificent intellectual development to another? Why is it that we have all degrees of intelligence, from orthodoxy to genius, if it was intended that all should think and feel alike?

It is incredible that only idiots are absolutely sure of salvation. It is incredible that the more brain you have the less your chance is. There can be no danger in honest thought, and if the world ever advances beyond what it is to-day, it must be led by men who express their real opinions.

Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence. Torture by rogue American troops or agents puts all Americans at risk, especially our rank-and-file soldiers stationed in dozens of dangerous places around the globe. God forbid terrorists take American soldiers or travelers hostage and torture them as some kind of sick retaliation for Abu Gharib.

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!

I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

The universe is an intelligence test.

[The Joint Intelligence Committee] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

The intelligence is clear: [Saddam Hussein] continues to believe that his weapons of mass destruction programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. It is essential to his regional power. Prior to the inspectors coming back in, he was engaged in a systematic exercise in concealment of those weapons.

We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years-contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence-Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.