Quotes About Intelligence

The brain isn't very much like a computer, although it doesn't do a bad job, considering that it's built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure chance than anything else.

here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Oddly enough, our views were shaped quite a bit by the example of the thirteenth-century Mongol campaigns of conquest. Genghis Khan's "hordes" – often smaller than the armies they faced – benefited immeasurably from what we today call near-real-time reporting on the disposition, composition, and movements of the enemy by their corps of "Arrow Riders," a Pony-Express-like communication system that gave the Khan a consistent winning advantage.

Most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.

They sat there in ascending order of age and stupidity.

that girl has no more sense than a postage stamp.

My new book on moral intelligence calls these patriarchies "cultures of obedience," and presents an ethics of virtues as a way to avoid such moral totalism.

When a person represses over the course of a number of years, intelligence is greatly contaminated and diminished. The frozen patterns become chronic patterns. It is as if the "on" button is stuck and plays all the time. Figure 4.6 shows how little intelligence is left uncontaminated.

Contaminated intelligence seriously lessens one's decision-making process, since the will needs perception, intelligence and imagination in order to make decisions. The human will becomes "disabled.

I agree with John Holt that the true test of intelligence is not what you know or can regurgitate from memory on an exam. It's not what you know how to do, but "what you do when you don't know what to do." Harold Gardner has convincingly shown that we have eight or nine different kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately we only measure literacy and mathematical intelligence for our IQ.

A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called "time span of discretion," or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.

Illusions are a necessary consequence of intelligence. Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. Would we be better off without visual illusions? We would in fact be worse off—like a person who never says anything to avoid making any mistakes. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?")

There's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that.

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race.

It's a wise conspirator that knows his own name.

Five reasonably intelligent men sat in a stupor of impotence, repeating wearily the essentials of a problem which they could not solve.

Why does wealth make dull people so much duller?

The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot not know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be your cracks, that anything at all can be your fault.

En Harvard y otras universidades, estudiaron la importancia de la actitud en el éxito de las personas. Se descubrió que la actitud era mucho más importante que la inteligencia, la educación, el talento especial o la suerte. De hecho, se llegó a la conclusión de que hasta un 85% del éxito en la vida se debe a tener una actitud positiva y educable, mientras que sólo un 15% se debe a la capacidad.

Most careers involve other people. You can have great academic intelligence and still lack social intelligence—the ability to be a good listener, to be sensitive toward others, to give and take criticism well.

Cartoonist Henri Arnold said, "The wise man questions himself, the fool others.