“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”

—  John Taylor Gatto

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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John Taylor Gatto 40
American teacher, book author 1935–2018

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“I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv

“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: The Mismeasure of Man (1996), p. 272

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“What is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

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“Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

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“The quality of the human mind, considered in its collective aspect, which most strikes us, in surveying this record, is its colossal patience.”

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“I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.”

Humphry Davy (1778–1829) Cornish chemist

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 241

“Historically, the original purpose of the theory of probability was to describe the exceedingly narrow domain of experience connected with games of chance, and the main effort was directed to the calculation of certain probabilities.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

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“I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

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“Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Reported by J. S. Huxley in Evolution in Action, London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.
1950s

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“Common sense is as rare as genius.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

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