Quotes About Intelligence

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.

Tennis doesn't encourage any kind of intellectual development.

Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.

Success means at least you are finding full potential to who you are in terms of your intelligence, your capability and competence: you are finding full expression to who you are. This is important.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

In those days I was terrible at athletics and never made a team, but quite easily led my class in academics.

I had terrible ear problems and asthma and allergies. I spent quite a bit of time in hospital up to the age of eight so was not - am still not - extraordinarily intelligent.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

I'm not terribly science-y. I couldn't tell you what's the binomial equation or how many atoms in a mole.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peace' - it's like you're in a comedy sketch and you think you're smart.

The smartest people I know have that extra edge. The risk is always there that you'll look terribly undignified and slobbering, and inside I cringe about that, but I should be more aggressive.

I'm not terribly intelligent - I have no university degree, you know.

If you're showing people where it's smooth sailing, where is the joke? If you go back to any movie, even a conventional movie, with any comedians, they're either not terribly intelligent or they're not doing something well.

People confuse being full of words with being terribly intelligent and informed.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.