Intelligence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing. There is an amusing epilogue to this analogy: in fact, the alchemists were right. Lead can be converted into gold by a particle accelerator hurling appropriate beams at lead targets. The AI visionaries may be right in the same way, and they are likely to be wrong in the same way.

Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.

Every Librarian is a highly trained agent. An expert in intelligence, counterintelligence, Boolean searching, and hand-to-hand combat.

The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.

It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.

Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige,
or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on
academic abilities, ignoring the emotional intelligence that also
matters immensely for our personal destiny.

Despite the proven benefits of emotional intelligence, organizational life has typically been hostile to the inner world of feeling. Rationality is deemed superior to feeling, which can contaminate judgment. But without feeling there is no passion, and no action.

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.

The successes obtained in the government of the arts, are similar to the successes obtained in the government of men. We may succeed for a time, by fraud, by surprise, by violence: we can succeed permanently only by means directly opposite. It is not alone the courage, the intelligence, the activity of the manufacturer and the merchant which maintain the superiority of the productions and the commerce of their country; it is far more their wisdom, their economy, above all their probity.

This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.

But an escape less self-depreciating was taken by Lord Westbury, who, it is said, rebuffed a barrister's reliance upon an earlier opinion of his Lordship: "I can only say that I am amazed that a man of my intelligence should have been guilty of giving such an opinion". If there are other ways of gracefully and good-naturedly surrendering former views to a better considered position, I invoke them all.

Robert H. Jackson

If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it — why — there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America — with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side. But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

Stephen Colbert

I know lots of people who are educated far beyond their intelligence.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.

That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Joseph Goebbels

Strange indeed would it be if all the space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of Earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself.

To have success in science, you need some luck.
But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward.

James Dewey Watson

The war plan was incompetent in its rejection of the advice from military professionals and the analysis of the intelligence was incompetent in its conclusion that our soldiers would be welcomed with garlands of flowers and cheering crowds. Thus we would not need to respect the so-called Powell doctrine of overwhelming force.
There was also in Rumsfeld's planning a failure to provide security for nuclear materials, and to prevent widespread lawlessness and looting.
Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers even though they were denied the tools and the numbers they needed for their mission.

Convergence is, in my opinion, not only deeply fascinating but, curiously, it is as often overlooked. More importantly, it hints at the existence of a deeper structure to biology. It helps us to delineate a metaphorical map across which evolution must navigate. In this sense the Darwinian mechanisms and the organic substrate we call life are really a search engine to discover particular solutions, including intelligence and—risky thought—perhaps deeper realities?

Simon Conway Morris

While universities make robots that look more like human beings every time, not only because of their proven intelligence but now also because of their abilities to express and receive emotions, the consumerist habits are making us every time more similar to robots.

In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions.

Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome.

[Roosevelt] was always... finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.