Quotes About Genius

It was Jefferson's genius that kept the American Revolution from being sucked into the tunnel faster than it was. Jefferson had red hair. Nothing is implied here.

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course.

You do not have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

Give me the fingers of Mozart, and there is no musical piece I cannot play. Give me the mind of Einstein, and there is no mathematical formula I cannot unravel. Give me the arms of Hank Aaron, and there is no home run I cannot hit. Give me the life of Jesus Christ, and there is no victory I cannot achieve.

The frictionless genius of our creative class, which we see every day in our lives and in advertising, leads us to support environmental destruction and human enslavement that we never see.

Aristotle observed more than 2,400 years ago, "There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

How many geniuses at the level of Bach and Van Gogh died before the needed technologies were available for their talents to take root?

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

Even as the Virginia Company presented its plans to the king—through his privy council—for royal approval, Smythe set out to promote the company's new venture. Sir Thomas (he was knighted by James I soon after the king took the throne) was one of England's wealthiest and most powerful merchants. He had long been involved in foreign trade with Russia, through the Muscovy Company, and he was the head of the East India Company. He was also a marketing genius.

Forget wondering, Am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself.

The Incas' genius— like that of the Romans—lay in their masterful organizational abilities. Amazingly, an ethnic group that probably never exceeded 100,000 individuals was able to regulate the activities of roughly ten million people. This was in spite of the fact that the empire's citizens spoke more than seven hundred local languages and were distributed among 2,500 miles of some of the most rugged and diverse terrain on earth.

No crime too small' was never exactly Moriarty's slogan, but the criminal genius would apply himself to minor offences if an unusual challenge was presented.

Often individuals whose mental gifts so far outpaced their contemporaries, tended to lack the social graces commensurate with their other accomplishments.

He might be a genius, but that did not make him a leader

...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

If we then ask what sort of mind is likeliest to display the qualities of military genius, experience and observation will both tell us that it is the inquiring rather than the creative mind, the comprehensive rather than the specialized approach, the calm rather than the excitable head to which in war we would choose to entrust...

Among uncivilised people, we never really find a great general, and very seldom what we can properly call a military genius because that requires a development of the intelligent powers which cannot be found in an uncivilised state.

A distinguished commander without boldness is unthinkable. no man who is not…bold can play such a role, and therefore we consider this quality the first prerequisite of the great military leader. How much of this quality remains by the time he reaches senior rank, after training and experience have affected and modified it, is another question. The greater the extent to which it is retained, the greater the range of his genius.

And it is at this point that an extraordinary idea occurred to him, a stroke of pure genius: the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the general theory of relativity. Newton's "space," through which things move, and the "gravitational field" are one and the same thing.

Boltzmann was not taken seriously. At the age of fifty-six, in Duino, near Trieste, he committed suicide. Today he is considered one of the geniuses of physics.

And it's here that Einstein's extraordinary stroke of genius occurs, one of the greatest flights in the history of human thinking: what if the gravitational field turned out actually to be Newton's mysterious space? What if Newton's space was nothing more than the gravitational field? This extremely simple, beautiful, brilliant idea is the theory of general relativity.

It is characteristic of genius to be aware of the limitations of its own findings

The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else.

If Planck is the father of the theory, Einstein is the parent who nurtured it.