Intelligence quotes
320 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside intelligence — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant."
"The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed."
"Through all the years that I spent formulating my philosophical system, I was looking desperately for “intelligent agreement” or at least for “intelligent disagreement.” I found neither. Today, I am not looking for “intelligent disagreement” any longer ... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement."
"If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now."
"He was not so much brain as earwax"
"I will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of fools."
"Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark."
"Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence."
"The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them."
"As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labor."
"We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants."
"State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."
"Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them."
"If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results—the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been—and finally—an important thing—the intelligence to interpret the results."
"It's a big jump from smart to motherwit."
"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."
"We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."
"You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live."
"It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point."
"The first mark of intelligence, to be sure, is not to start things; the second mark of intelligence is to pursue to the end what you have started."
