Quotes About Intelligence

Smart man to admit he's an idiot

Until now, the densest single unit of information processing on this planet was the human brain

Nothing increases the odds of victory more than letting the enemy think he''s already taken your secret weapon."

If a crystal ball gives God any advantage, then you've got a stupid God.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de

Maybe it was common for intelligent beings anywhere to think of themselves as the crown of creation—The People—and everybody else as a smart animal at best.

I think wisdom is over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I'd rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people I know give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn't like.

MyÅ›lÄ™, ?e mÄ…dro?? to tylko spryt wypatroszony z odwagi. WolaÅ'abym by? sprytna ni? mÄ…dra.

Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

As best I can tell there was no advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which was the first significant foreign terrorist activity in the U.S. No tip-offs that it was coming.

The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center.

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

World War II provides a string of celebrated cases of deception and manipulation.

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

After World War II, defending America in the modern world required new intelligence agencies, the unification of the armed services under a massive new Defense Department, and later the creation of new civilian organizations with some defense functions, such as NASA and the Energy Department.

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

Man is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe.

That world of spies and espionage, there's a coldness to it. That's what makes those worlds fascinating - and what makes le Carre's work so interesting.

The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own.

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.

Well, it's a - I don't want to disappoint you, but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.

U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I'm worried about us, the foreigners.