Quotes About Intelligence

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.

Human rationality depends on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.

people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly."22

Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

On the other hand, those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is something that can be grown. Effort, work, and challenges are what make intelligence grow and flower and bear juicy fruit. People with a growth mindset aren't as attached to demonstrating their intelligence because they know intelligence can be increased, and so intelligence isn't a fundamental, unvarying aspect of their sense of self. Notice I said, "aren't as attached.

It's people who don't think who sink into bigotry.

T]he two main sources of heroin in America since World War II—the so-called "Golden Triangle" in Southeast Asia and the "French Connection" in Marseilles—were established in the course of operations by the U.S. Government's intelligence community. They have been protected by that community, ostensibly to further national security. A newer and more diffuse source of drugs, in Latin America, has often been protected similarly.

There are also several notes in your file suggesting that you are a world-class smartass." "Really? You mean I made it through the nationals?" "And you apparently think you're hilarious." "You're saying I'm not?

The higher the levels of anxiety, the more likely a person is to have a high IQ. Genetic research suggests that intelligence may have co-evolved with worry in humans

It is a crime every time we ask ourselves how smart a person is, instead of asking ourselves what makes that person smart.

calculation and boldness. (Photo courtesy John

The definition of music used in this course will be as follows: music is the universal language of emotions communicated through intelligently ordered sounds consisting of rhythm and pitch. (The first half of this definition was arrived at through

In a conflict of opinion between Einstein and a fool, one wishes for Einstein to prevail. And in a conflict between Einstein and thousand fools or a million, one wishes all the more for Einstein to prevail.

That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief.

If you end up doing nothing but praying we will be living in segregation two hundred or three hundred years from now … God will never allow prayer to become a substitute for working intelligence.

If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion.

A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

My mind works on several levels at once.1

How old's Bulkus, exactly? Thirty? Forty, tops? Well listen, I've got two-thousand years of accumulated wisdom here, and I get it wrong sometimes. For instance, I thought you had something to you when I met you in the gorge: intelligence, flexibility of mind — hah! How misinformed was I?

A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly.