Quotes About Intelligence

Paul Cleveland, the American Ambassador in Wellington, informed Lange that henceforth his country would not be receiving NSA's precious sigint jewels. Lange responded tartly that they were not jewels by any means, and the intelligence cut-off was probably a good thing, since he would now 'have more time to do the crossword".

This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's future.

But there can be no real progress in solving America's social problems when they are as misperceived as they are today. What good can come of understanding the relationship of intelligence to social structure and public policy? Little good can come without it.

and one other who asked to remain anonymous out of his wish to preserve, as he put it, a viable political future.

That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human.

Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.

Gossip about who in the tribe is cleverest has probably been a topic of conversation around the fire since fires, and conversation, were invented.

Darwin had asserted that the transmission of inherited intelligence was a key step in human evolution, driving our simian ancestors apart from the other apes.

he was led to put in formal terms what most people had always taken for granted: People vary in their intellectual abilities and the differences matter, to them personally and to society.

People differ in their talents, their intellectual strengths and weaknesses, their preferred forms of imagery, their mental vigor.

in 1904, a former British Army officer named Charles Spearman made a conceptual and statistical breakthrough that has shaped both the development and much of the methodological controversy about mental tests ever since.5

a curious result kept turning up: If the same group of people took two different mental tests, anyone who did well (or poorly) on one test tended to do similarly well (or poorly) on the other. In statistical terms, the scores on the two tests were positively correlated.

The course of learning is affected by intelligence, in Spearman's view, but it was not the thing in itself. Spearmanian intelligence was a measure of a person's capacity for complex mental work.

By 1908, the concept of mental level (later called mental age) had been developed, followed in a few years by a slightly more sophisticated concept, the intelligence quotient.

Beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts. Many people are twice as smart as they think they are but they've been intimidated into believing some topics are above them. You can understand almost anything if it is explained well. " ~ "World War I - The Rest of the Story and How it Affects You Today

Dying isn't the worst thing in the world, but dying because you're stupid is.

Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity.

No wonder Sherlock Holmes did all that coke. Math is hard.

Never underestimate the power of stupid

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

You know who Anne Frank is?' I asked. 'Of course,' he said, as if I had offended his intelligence and Dutch pride. 'When they came to get her, they went right to her hiding place.' 'I know.' 'And that means someone betrayed her.' 'But who did it?' he said. 'You.

This also turned out to be negative, so there is no material in the Central Intelligence Agency, either in the records or in the mind of any of the individuals, that there was any contact had or even contemplated with him.

Yes we have a specific procedure which we follow in all cases where the Agency is in contact, for the purposes of acquiring intelligence or whatever the case may be, with an individual.

A powerful example of beliefs at work: When schoolchildren are encouraged to believe that their bad grades come from lack of effort rather than lack of intelligence, they show remarkable gains in both persistence and accomplishment.