Quotes About Intelligence

I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am.

In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

Our planet is dying. Whales will be extinct before we ever get to know them. They say these creatures are so intelligent. They may disappear from the face of the Earth before we know them, and that is a great tragedy.

IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever.

The vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, even after interrogation, had no further intel value whatsoever.

I'm smart enough to know I shouldn't be behind the wheel.

I tested in the top percentile for IQ, but I couldn't tie my shoes or really ride a bike without training wheels until I was almost 7.

I used to say that whenever people heard my Southern accent, they always wanted to deduct 100 IQ points.

That moment in 'Broadcast News' where Holly Hunter is told how great it is to be the smartest person in the room, and she cries and says it's awful - I definitely have moments like that sometimes, moments when introspection and drive can be lonely-making. And it doesn't help that I have a partner who is very work-oriented.

Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

Whereas any political party, and nearly all voters, prize consistency as a sign of authentic, values-driven thinking, it is deeply alien to the hacker, who holds that changing your mind is simply intelligence in action.

Synths are a very low level of artificial intelligence. Whereas you have a Stradivarius that will live for a thousand years.

An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.'

Busquets is a sitting midfield player who breaks up play, intercepts, passes it very quickly and is intelligent. That's what he is. He's not much more than that, but he gets a lot of praise for it. Whereas Eric Dier does a similar job, but sometimes gets loads of criticism for it.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.

Some people are born good-looking. Some have the gift of gab. And some are lucky enough to be born smarter than the rest of us. Whether we like it or not, Mother Nature does not dole these characteristics out evenly.

All I can do is put out the good stuff, and people will make the decision on whether they like it. My fans are very intelligent people. They're not stupid. They know what's good.

The jury is still out on whether I'm a genius or not.

In any competitive environment, whether you're in sales or marketing or whatever it is, you have to know your competition, understand who they are, do intelligent analysis on them and then you have to know yourself - who you are and what you're capable of doing.