Quotes About Intelligence

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

Your Egnlish is so atrocious I don't feel the need to even respond' seems but a long-winded way of saying, 'Home-schooled dumbass.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.

By definition, intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States hope to deny we work to reveal.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

The only people that ever stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers. Because our culture is, never break faith with the truth. We'll tell you, you don't have to drag it out of us.

To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days.

This life's hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.

They misunderestimated me.

There are cameras nowadays that have been developed to tell the difference between a squirrel and a bomb.

A sensible woman can never be happy with a fool.

He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers.

Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.

Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds and noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind.

I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.

As the psychologist Carl Jung once said, 'If our civilization were to perish, it would be due more to stupidity than to evil.

It took the OSS nearly two years after the IOR's formation before it stumbled across intelligence that Hitler's Reichsbank was transferring money to the Vatican and disguising its origin by using a Swiss bank as an intermediary.62

I had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.

In all known life, there are primarily twenty different amino acids. Stringing these twenty amino acids together in varied sequences produces varied proteins, just as intelligently stringing together the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet in varied sequences will produce varied sentences and sonnets.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.