Quotes About Intelligence

I lie there thinking about how everything I've done is a failure, death and failure, and there's no hope for me except being homeless, because I'm never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.

You are blessed with a good mind. You just have to have confidence in it and talk when people call on you.

I'm young, but I'm already screwing up my life. I'm smart but not enough - just smart enough to have problems.

Our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff and generally we call those people smart, but at the end of the day who do you want- the person who can figure things out that they've never seen before or the person who can rattle off a bunch of facts?

Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.

You could also ask who's in charge. Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us yet we can agree that no amount of tutelage will ever leave a chimp fluent in trigonometry. Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours.

I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves.

Intelligence and longevity do not seem to be correlated.

Stephen Hawking the reputation of being the smartest person alive. Most of us agree.

One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

For all we know, the aliens may have tried to get in touch centuries ago and have concluded that there is no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility is that aliens did become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, and drew the same conclusion.

most planets inhabited by intelligent observers are likely to be smaller than Earth

We will have very smart cities by the year 2020…

near real time. . . . If the intelligence establishment can in effect use a credit card to buy excellent commercial imagery, so can tyrants and terrorists.71

If humans are intelligent, so is the rest of Nature. Native peoples have always said this. The human species shows its decreasing ability to communicate--both internally and externally--by its failure to recognize this intelligence. In this sense, our immune failures are one more example of not having ears (receptors) to hear the voice of Nature with compassion.

The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.

I used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that's not intelligence: It's just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That's when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don't have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you'll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again.

La inteligencia verdadera se da cuando la mente y el corazón se conectan. Entonces es cuando ves la verdad de una forma tan nítida e inequívoca que no tienes ni que pensar en ella.

It's a problem, you know, Paul, dealing with stupid people. You project your own intelligence and rationality onto a person who is a complete idiot, and he lets you down.