Intelligence Quotes

Genius is independent of situation.

~ Charles Churchill

Oh Satan you're a wily one.

~ Craig Ferguson

With good parody, you have to be smarter that the people you’re parodying.

~ Craig Ferguson

The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.

~ James Mackintosh

Intuition is the highest form of intelligence, transcending all individual abilities and skills

~ Sylvia Clare

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

~ W.h. Auden

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

~ Alain De Botton

Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.

~ Rafael Sabatini

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

~ Norbert Wiener

Intelligence without wisdom brings destruction.

~ Erol Ozan

Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.

~ Vivienne Westwood

Since the dawn of time, women have been attracted to mates with strong survival skills—like intelligence and physical prowess—because men with these qualities are more likely to bring home dinner at the end of the day.” He stuck his thumbs in the air and grinned. “Dinner equals survival, team.

~ Becca Fitzpatrick

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

~ Gustave Flaubert

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

~ Arthur Miller

A positive needs a negative to complete its cycle, as the Moon needs an embodiment of itself, the Sun, to complete the cycle of its illusory essence, the Earth. Now if the earth is in dire straits, is bombing the moon to discover whether water is ‘perceived’ in the natural stance of humans an intelligent move?

~ Aainaa-Ridtz

Speaking of which, about assuming you had a condom—I just meant that you, with your experience, would be prepared for responsible sex, even if it were on the fly. An intelligent man is prepared for spontaneity.

~ Roberta Pearce

Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

~ Alain De Botton

Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.

~ Tom Sharpe

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)

~ Wendell Berry

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.

~ Erin Mccarthy

It's important to be smart, but it's also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.

~ Alisa Valdes

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.

~ Dorothy Parker

Parrots mimic their owners. Their owners consider that a sign of intelligence.

~ Marty Rubin

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

~ Diane Setterfield

I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.

~ John Steinbeck

Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.

~ Will Cuppy

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

~ Adam Gopnik

I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

~ Christopher Ryan

Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be.

~ Edan Lepucki

...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.

~ Lynne Truss

I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.

~ Criss Jami

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.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

~ Robert Reed

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!

~ Chaim Potok

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.

~ Steven Weinberg

The experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral is the consequences of perception.

~ Allan Lokos

The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above functionally retarded.

~ Tucker Max