Quotes About Intelligence

Life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It's more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly's eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths.

the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing

The result, in the words of a radio intelligence officer, "was confusion superimposed upon disaster.

Hypo had entered a virtuous circle. Nimitz, emboldened by intelligence reports that grew ever more tangible, authorized riskier and more ambitious carrier raids into Japanese waters.

A bedrock tenet of communications intelligence was that the enemy must always be encouraged to "feel safe," and never given cause to suspect that his radio transmissions were less than impenetrable.

An officer who testified that he had served in naval intelligence was convicted of perjury, on the grounds that no such thing had ever existed. Rookie pilots were required to spend the day in fur-lined winter flight suits with helmets and gloves, scanning the horizon for icebergs using "binoculars" fashioned from a pair of Coke bottles.

Do you like my working persona? Saiman asked softly. An aesthetically pleasing combination of intelligence and elegance, wouldn't you say? Aren't we pleased with ourselves. Are you Chinese, Japanese, half-white? I can't tell, your features are neither here nor there. I'm inscrutable, mysterious and intellectual. He forgot conceited. Did you have any trouble getting that ego through the door? Saiman didn't even blink. Not in the least.

She can tell you the height of the attacker from the trigonometry of the blood spatter, while I'm fuzzy on what trigonometry is.

The idiot had shot their own dog. That's what happened when the destructive potential of a man's weapons exceeded his intelligence.

A wise man once said, "A human mind is the place where emotion and reason are locked in perpetual combat. Sadly for our species, emotion always wins." I really liked that quote. It explained why, even though I was reasonably intelligent, I kept finding myself doing something really stupid. And it sounded much better than "Nevada Baylor, Total Idiot.

I think it's difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They're embarrassed to have people see them doing it.

To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.

Young people are more intelligent and sophisticated.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it.

When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.

I think I was maybe a ned. I don't know. I had a trakkie, a cap and got into trouble when I was younger and I don't remember other neds round about me, so I suppose I must have been one. But a thinking ned, an intelligent ned.

I think younger generation is much smarter than us. I am happy and proud of my kids.

I don't want to ever write a book that seems like it's pandering to younger people or talking down to people who I know are very smart.

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

As an entertainer, my first responsibility is to entertain my fans who have made me who I am today. I am not a preacher who can tell youngsters what they should be doing and what they should not be doing. The youth of our country is intelligent enough to know what is good and bad, and my songs can't change their thinking.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

To be a great actor, you really don't need to go to acting school or learn dance classes or work on your body. You have to be intelligent. You have to draw on a lot of emotions that you go through in life that you can tap into once you work on a set.