Quotes About Intelligence

The young man was even more astonished by the cleverness and audacity of his cat.

You're afraid of smart women, aren't you?' She had used this ploy before, having heard via the female bush telegraph that it was unanswerable. She was right though. I was leery of them. Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for a while but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.

What have you done when you have bested a fool?

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool

Ridicule is the first and last argument of fools.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a board subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed how much Warren reads - and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man.

The cardinal principle was: 'A double agent should, as far as possible, actually live the life and go through the motions of a genuine agent.

Job plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient.

Over the white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it.

You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

You're a trickster, Doctor, not a warrior.

He don't read. You know he doesn't have a book in his office? Not a fucking book in the shelves. Ain't that some shit? (Adolph Mongo speaking of Kwame Kilpatrick)

Sometimes I feel bad for the girls because they aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. In fact, they're more like a couple of dull butter knives that were left in the grass outside of the shed.

Hemos dejado atrás el concepto feudalista de que el intelecto es una prerrogativa de clase social, que la inteligencia es una cosa de herencia y del entorno;

Look closely at wisdom – there is a very small space between "wiz" and "dumb" -

Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists, and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence, the understanding of African society.

That had always been the way of the world: Those with intelligence pressed into service by those serving the priests and generals unless the priests and generals were suspicious, at which time, those with well-trained intelligence had to flee for safety.

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)