Intelligence Quotes

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

~ Douglas Adams

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

~ Aldous Huxley

However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.

~ Bart D. Ehrman

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

~ Maya Angelou

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

~ Isaac Asimov

The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer … They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth … [Then the Creator said]: 'They know all … what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!… Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?

~ Anonymous

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

~ James Madison

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

~ Jane Austen

I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.

~ Criss Jami

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

~ Horace Mann

Many much-learned men have no intelligence.

~ Democritus

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

~ Diane Arbus

I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes.

~ Claudia Gray

The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one's spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.

~ Criss Jami

I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. ... What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

~ Alan J. Perlis

Human strength plus intelligence cannot unlock the door that God is hiding its key.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one?A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.Q. Can you prove that this mathematics is valid?A. Only to another mathematician.Q. Your claim then is that your truth is of so esoteric a nature that it is beyond the understanding of a plain man. It seems to me that truth should be clearer than that, less mysterious, more open to the mind.A. It presents no difficulties to some minds. The physics of energy transfer, which we know as thermodynamics, has been clear and true through all the history of man since the mythical ages, yet there may be people present who would find it impossible to design a power engine. People of high intelligence, too.

~ Isaac Asimov

There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge.

~ Christopher Langan

God’s genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other’s company.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we’re not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don’t have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

~ Warren Ellis

Being ninty nine percent sure opens for a possibility that you might be a hundred percent wrong.

~ Hasse Jerner

We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.

~ Christopher Langan

It's a huge disservice to classify all minds as either closed or open. I find the best minds are closed by openable windows.

~ Criss Jami

The only sort of pride that may serve a man well on that rarest occasion is his hatred of being wrong. It keeps his mouth shut, his ears open, and his research extensive. And yet this is also the deadliest because when he is in fact proven wrong, he absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. It then keeps his mouth open, his ears shut, and his research inexistent.

~ Criss Jami

In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent.

~ Neal Stephenson

The acquiring of intelligence doesn't require an institution if you got the heart to seek knowledge, and the balls to use it as wisely as those who came before you.

~ James Emlund

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.

~ Criss Jami

Intelligence is not knowledge, but it is a state of mind.

~ Debasish Mridha

The Story Is Always ThereSometimes you don't need to speak to someone to know how they are feeling. You don't need to ask what is their story - often people have it written on their faces and you just have to take the time out to read it.

~ Delma Pryce

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone’s observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse.

~ Criss Jami

We must not allow our pride to be the motivation behind our apologetics; rather, philoverity, the love of truth must be the full and complete motivation. For pride corrupts truth.

~ Criss Jami

All knowledge meets an end at the question '...Why?

~ Criss Jami

Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don't blow the world up with the truth; you shock it into motion.

~ Criss Jami

Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.

~ Criss Jami

How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information.

~ Criss Jami

Because you're always learning, the chief lesson remains: you still know nothing.

~ Criss Jami

I've never, nor shall I ever, mourn the loss of a fool. Losing a fool, is the same as gaining, retaining, and reaffirming my intelligence.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau