Quotes About Intelligence

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

It is positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded.

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For

think men make more mistakes by being too clever than by being too good

What is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

With the proper training, I could've been an evil genius.

A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.

I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.

O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being the freshest modern instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

A woman's no business wi' being so clever; it'll turn to trouble, I doubt.

One must use such brains as are to be found

Un'intelligenza perfettamente sana è sempre un po' spaesata in questo pazzo mondo.

for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness

Maggie Tulliver, you perceive, was by no means that well trained, well-informed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is in these days; she had only been to school a year at St. Ogg's, and had so few books that she sometimes read the dictionary; so that in travelling over her small mind you would have found the most unexpected ignorance as well as unexpected knowledge.

without being obliged to dress itself in an elaborate costume of knowledge;

It's no mischief much while she's a little un; but an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she'll fetch none the bigger price for that.

Although it has been said by men of more wit than wisdom, and perhaps more malice than either, that women are naturally incapable of acting prudently, or that they are necessarily determined to folly, I must by no means grant it.