Quotes About Intelligence

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

One indictment of the religious right is not that it is heartless – a tautology in any case – but that is brainless.

The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.)

There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person's propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument." -

Watching and listening up close, I saw nothing to suggest that if his brains were made of TNT they would generate enough explosive power to disarrange his hair.

The most arresting thing about Palin, indeed, is the absolutely unbreachable serenity of her ignorance. She already has all the information she requires.

Evolution, he said, is smarter than you are. But this compliment to the intelligence of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of intelligent design. Some of the results are extremely impressive, as we are bound to think in our own case. ... But the process by which the results are attained is slow and infinitely laborious, and has given us a DNA string which is crowded with useless junk and which has much in common with much lower creatures.

In the first half of the century, British intelligence was principally a machine for involving the United States in war on the British side.

Even in a country as broad-minded as Holland, the elders had preferred to make common cause with Christian anti-Semites and other obscurantists, rather than permit the finest of their number to use his own free intelligence.

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination.

Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

The dull always seek to be clever at the fool's expense, to somehow repay him for his cutting wit, but never are they clever, and often they are cruel.

The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The

killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

From now on you're going to have to think. There's a reason why we're born with brains in our heads, not rocks.

Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language.

I agree that it's important to be of a virtuous nature, but I would also contend that if you had to choose between giving a man a noble disposition or teaching him to think clearly, you'd do better to teach him to think clearly. Too many problems in this world are caused by men with noble dispositions and clouded minds.