Quotes About Intelligence

I abhor the man whose first remark after being introduced is "How warm, or how cold, it is." It proves either that he is a fool, or that he thinks I am one. This one expatiated on the weather. "Insufferable" I said, which might be applied to both himself and the heat.

Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.

he came to the conclusion that there was some mysterious connection between cleverness and unhappiness, and thanking his stars that he was neither scholar, courtier, nor poet

Idealists make brave agents, but they are bad intelligence officers. They cannot exist for long without the company of like minds; they have a need to speak their beliefs and to hear their beliefs spoken.

Like all good intelligence officers, Webster knew how to form friendships and use the friends he made. No human action surprised him or touched his emotions.

How clever of you, sir, to be rich rather than smart.

wolf bone was the Stone Age equivalent of a supercomputer.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

The Denizen of Number 10 is the avatar—the humanoid sock-puppet—of an ancient and undying intelligence who regards mere humanity much as we might regard a hive of bees. Our lives are of no individual concern to Him, but He likes honey.

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

So once again Janice proves that not only is she a nerd, she's a useful nerd who gets to stay on the team.

Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—

the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.

In the Laundry we supposedly pride ourselves on our procedures. We've got procedures for breaking and entering offices, procedures for reporting a shortage of paper clips, procedures for summoning demons from the vasty deeps, and procedures for writing procedures. We may actually be on track to be the world's first ISO-9000 total-quality-certified intelligence agency.

Personally I blame the Flynn effect—in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two

If he wakes the ancient sleeping horrors I am going to have to brief the private secretary and the Joint Intelligence Oversight Committee so that they can explain CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to the COBRA Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, and I expect that will make them extremely unhappy

Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy.

Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads.

But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient—I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis

New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge.