Quotes About Intelligence

I see,' said Jerott slowly. 'You've thought it all out.' 'That's what I do,' said Lymond. 'I sit on my brood-patch and think.

Do you swim? Hunt? Wrestle? I see. Can you use a crossbow? Your longest shot? Can you count? Read and write? Ah, the sting of sarcasm—Have we a scholar here? Then produce us a specimen," said Lymond. "What about some modest quatrains? Frae vulgar prose to flowand Latin. Deafen us, enchant us, educate us, boy.

Are we going to have a sensible discussion?' she said. 'Well, you are sensible,' Lymond said. 'And I am not unconscious, yet.

Let us save everyone's faces,' Lymond said, 'while we can. And before Master Buchanan is hurled to the floor by either Nicolas or a thunderbolt from the late Copernicus.

A long time afterwards, she was to remember what an excellent chess-player Francis Crawford was.

Oh,' said Philippa. 'Checkmate,' Lymond said.

To the devil with your pearldrops and your parroty manners. A filled mind and an apt wit will earn you all the respect any man has the means to deserve.

She wondered what archaeologists in the year A.D. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or only vestiges of folly and violence?

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.

My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view." To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

although we often succeed in teaching our pupils subjects, we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.

The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects—but does that always mean that they actually know more?

Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.

What devilish things we do when we try to be clever.

Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.

Euginicists considered Southern Blacks to be especially unfit to breed based on a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent Blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind. Selective migration was thought to explain the embarrassing finding that Blacks from Northern cities had scored higher on the army intelligence tests than some groups of Southern whites.

Dr. C, chief of surgery at a northeastern hospital, for example, gave Corea his opinion that "a girl with lots of kids, on welfare, and not intelligent enough to use birth control, is better off being sterilized." " 'Not intelligent enough to use birth control,;' " Corea added, "is often a code phrase for 'black' or 'poor.

She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.

A good detective not only has to be intelligent, persevering and prepared to do enless boring routine work, he also needs one other quality: Intuition. I see it rather as the ability to make connections which are there but are not immediately apparent. Subterranean connections.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.