Quotes About Intelligence

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

intelligence is intuitive you needn't learn to love unless you've been taught to fear and hate

The security of the United States, which is so dependent on having accurate and timely intelligence, is not a Republican or a Democratic issue.

Intelligence is our first line of defense against terrorism, and we must improve the collection capabilities and analysis of intelligence to protect the security of the United States and its allies.

Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.

No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?

Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness.

correspondent in the Middle East, attaché William Yale. With that dispatch he was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years.

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. "It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen." But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

He found Frank Wisner much harder to read. "He was extremely polite, and obviously very intelligent, but there was a kind of tension, a nervousness, about him. And he was a Southerner, of course. I hadn't really been around many Southerners at that point, so it was hard for me to square his energy level, his dynamism, with this soft accent, this gracious quality of his.

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong... Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate, they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas.

the average person isn't that smart — and worse, half the population is dumber than that average person.

Being a good lead is all about switching hats: knowing which level of abstraction to work at to solve a problem. It's rarely a question of intelligence; instead, it's picking the right perspective to use on a particular challenge.

good thinking wins,

It's foreign to us, and our faith in hierarchies, but science bears out emergent intelligence as fact.

Progress depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores.

couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys—but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly. —Richard Feynman

It takes intelligence to act dumb.

Are you smarter than a pig, Locke?" "On occasion," said Locke. "There are contrary opinions.

I keep asking myself," whispered Sabetha, giving Locke's arm a squeeze, "ARE we smarter than that woman's chicken?" "At the moment, it's an open question," said Locke.

If you put Durant's brains in a thimble full of water they'd look like a ship lost in the middle of the sea.

Are you smarter than my chicken?" cried a weathered, wild-haired woman holding a nonplussed bird over her head. At her feet was a wooden board covered with numbers and arcane symbols. "Lay your bets! Test your wits against a trained fowl! One coppin a try! Are you smarter than my chicken? You might be in for a surprise!