Quotes about intelligence (2406 quotes, page 12)

“And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life", becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding"….
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 104–06 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n573/mode/2up/search/depopulation
The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life , Marriage , Children , World

“Those who live with pigs often speak of them as we normally speak of dogs—intelligent, loyal, and above all, affectionate. Each one, I am continually reminded by people who know them, is a complete individual, like no other pig.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Pig Who Sang to the Moon (2003), Ch. 1, p. 52

People , Dogs

“Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. (Hays translation)”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breathe and the ruling Reason (Haines translation)
This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs.
A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all – that is myself.
II, 2
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

“It is very likely that there are many, many planets carrying life, even intelligent life, throughout the universe, because there are so many stars. By sheer chance, even if those chances are small, a great many life forms and a great many intelligences may exist.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Interview http://americanindian.net/asimov.html in Southwest Airlines Magazine 1979)
General sources

Life , Star , Universe , Chance

“!-- What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born babies don’t see any difference between them, their playpen and their Dad. It’s all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it’s not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept ‘I’ we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn’t it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story. -->If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe. We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line: in the beginning, there was the word. By giving sky one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God , World , Idea , Universe

“All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 6
Islands in the Stream (1970)

“[H]e is of the intelligentsia (which means he has been educated beyond his intelligence).”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 6, p. 105

Education

“I am not well suited to the tasks that are set before me today. Most of what I must do is either insulting to my intelligence, or far beyond my capabilities. This explains why I am so frustrated and full of rage most of the time.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

April 12
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Rage , Time

“powerful intelligence, a formidable receptacle of culture and gifted with words.”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

As a quote by Jaime C. De Veyra in "81 Years of Premio Zobel Legacy of Philippine Literature in Spanish" by Lourdes Castrillo Brillantes. Vibal Publishing House, Inc. 2006.
BALIW

“We use more discriminating intelligence when we buy a used car than when we buy a religion. Buying a used car you at least look underneath the hood, hit the tires, maybe take it to a mechanic to check it out. But in buying a religion you're supposed to wear these narrow blinders, so that if anybody disagrees you can block it out. It's basically, check your brains at the door when you join a religion.”

David C. Lane (1956) American scholar

[Dodie, Bellamy, Hi Fubbi, this is Gakko: Former Eckankar Member Revisits the Movement, San Diego Reader, June 22, 1995]

Religion , Cars

“Making the movie Babe opened my eyes to the intelligence and the inquisitive personalities of pigs. These highly social animals possess an amazing capacity for love, joy and sorrow that makes them remarkably similar to our beloved canine and feline friends.”

James Cromwell (1940) American actor and producer

Said in a press statement for SaveBabe campaign, as quoted in "James Cromwell: King Lear, Babe and the Black Panthers" http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/10/26/james-cromwell-king-lear-babe-and-the-black-panthers/ in Nouse (26 October 2007)

Love , Animals , Joy , Personality

“This capacity for imitation is possessed by savages, at least by the more intelligent ones, and it has deceived us time after time. The British are as gullible as we are. Hundreds and hundreds of times, at least, they gave scholarships to Blacks from Basutoland or Kenya or Nigeria or one of their other possessions, and the result was almost always the same. With the money given him, the savage bought himself a good wardrobe, attended an English school, learned to play soccer, attended Oxford, wrote a charming essay on Wordsworth or on ancient law, copulated with half-witted English women who thought him "romantic" and themselves "broad-minded," and when he got tired of living on English generosity, went home to his tribe where he had a well-roasted baby served up to him as a delicacy of which he had been long deprived by the stupid prejudices of the stupid British.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Women , Money , Stupidity , School

“I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

Thinking , Sense , Wedding

“For, primarily, the immigrant comes here for economic reasons. If he is a dependent, there is no room for him. If he believes that in America one need not work, there is no room for him. If he has been taught that his labor is a commodity for sale, he must learn that labor is no more a commodity than management. It is the product of labor, the product of management, that is put up for sale. In the last analysis, it is man's intelligence that is purchased. Only in undeveloped countries can man be regarded as a beast of burden.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Learning , Dependency , Country

“Gould's arguments on the quirkiness of human intelligence are not only presented as part of an evolutionary argument, but also I believe to buttress an ideological viewpoint. In brief, his assessment of Man as an evolutionary accident is to lead us into a libertarian attitude whereby, by virtue of a cosmic accident, we, and we alone, have no choice but to take responsibility for our own destiny and mould it to our desire.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 14.

Parting

“Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

Money , Art , History , Motivation

“Finding an alternative to supplement military ways of resolving international conflicts has been taken up by many people skilled in various areas such as political science, economics, social studies, modelling and simulation, intelligence and expert systems, military strategy and weaponry as well as private business and industry.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut, Peter Kopacek, Tibor Vámos (1989) International conflict resolution using system engineering: proceedings of the IFAC workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 5-8 June 1989. International Federation of Automatic Control.

People , Way , Business , Study

“Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

Time

“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security. This much is undisputed… This is a difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make. Any vote that may lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Senate speech (10 October 2002) http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2002_record&docid=cr10oc02-70
Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

War , Decision

“You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't change human nature from intelligent self-interest into pure idealism—not in this life; and if you could, what would be left for paradise?”

Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836–1926) American politician

Maxim quoted in a tribute to Cannon on his retirement, reported in The Sun, Baltimore, Maryland (March 4, 1923); Congressional Record (March 4, 1923), vol. 64, p. 5714.

Life , Nature , Change

“For months the life of the little band went on much as it had before, except that Tarzan's greater intelligence and his ability as a hunter were the means of providing for them more bountifully than ever before. Most of them, therefore, were more than content with the change in rulers.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Life , Change

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

As quoted in Improving the Quality of Life for the Black Elderly: Challenges and Opportunities : Hearing before the Select Committee on Aging, House of Representatives, One Hundredth Congress, first session, September 25, 1987 (1988)
This quote's earliest known source is from Leon C. Megginson (see Charles Darwin)
Misattributed

Change

“A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic “sounded like a happy man”, and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get any time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality.”
As I thought of that busy, artless life—no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about—I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim”. The critic said that once a year he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives, but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, pp. 112–113
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Love , Life , Books , World

“Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming—and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen…or ascribes it to the malice of God or man.”

James Blish book The Quincunx of Time

Source: The Quincunx of Time (1973), Chapter 8, “The Courtship of Posi and Nega” (p. 84; ellipsis in the original)

God , Motivation , Cooking

“Your intelligence is so deeply entangled with the social identification that you have taken on, your brains are not working in line with the life within you; it is working against your own life. That is the source of misery.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Joy 24x7

Life

“In recent years, demagogy, violence, cruelty, and vileness have seized a great country embarked on the path of socialist development. I refer, of course, to China. It is impossible without horror and pain to read about the mass contagion of anti-humanism being spread by "the great helmsman" and his accomplices, about the Red Guards who, according to the Chinese radio, "jumped with joy" during public executions of "ideological enemies" of Chairman Mao.
The idiocy of the cult of personality has assumed in China monstrous, grotesquely tragicomic forms, carrying to the point of absurdity many of the traits of Stalinism and Hitlerism. But this absurdity has proved effective in making fools of tens of millions of people and in destroying and humiliating millions of intelligent citizens.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships

Pain , People , Fools , Reading

“Every cradle asks us, "Whence?" and every coffin, "Whither?" The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

At A Child's Grave (1882)

Question , Dead

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”

John Green book The Fault in Our Stars

Hazel's Dad, p. 213-214
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

History , Thinking , Universe , Parting

“The intelligence of the universe is social.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

V, 30
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

Universe

“By Thy perfect Intelligence, O Mazda
Thou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences,
And by Thy Thought gave our selves the power of thought, word, and deed.
Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.”

Zoroaster Persian prophet and founder of Zoroastrianism

Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 11.
The Gathas

Faith , Perfection

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Wallenstein, part i. Act ii, scene 4 (translated from Schiller)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith , Religion , Beauty , Mountain

“But yet another thing is necessary, Purity of spirit; for an intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life, where none can err; for the pure spirit expands ceaselessly and follows rapidly in purified love, the enlightened intelligence towards its Cause.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 150

Love , Life , God , Light

“Wisdom is the assimilated knowledge in us, gained from an intelligent estimation and close study of our own direct and indirect experience in the world.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Wisdom , World , Knowledge , Study

“It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"Class Struggle on the Desktop"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

People , Guy , History , Question

“Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they’re worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange ducks trying to understand what this nuclear business is all about and read the “respectable” journals the CIA leaks information to, please don’t get the idea this makes you a more respectable arm chair analyst than anyone else.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Communication , Idea , Understanding , Business

“In the United States, the slightest infusion of Teutonic blood is thought to be sufficient to account for any considerable degree of intelligence found under any possible color of the skin.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Self-Made Men (1872)

Color

“In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 8

People , Education , Sense , Future

“Much of the present unpopularity of the theory of Americanization is due to confusion in men's minds. It has grown with such rapidity that this has been inevitable. One thinks it is summed up in learning the English language; another thinks it is achieved by becoming an American citizen; a third, that it is adopting American clothes and manners and associating with native Americans; and a fourth, that it means that everybody should be able to sing "The Star Spangled Banner". The means of Americanization are still confused with its essence. While the necessary things were being done each day to help win the war, people were asking : Can we work intelligently and effectively together in a national effort, without agreement as to the definition, the substance, and the form of Americanization? What are the probabilities of success if these matters are left to the individual determination of the thousands of persons and of agencies now at work Americanizing the 2400 or more communities having foreign-born residents? They are beginning to ask what will be the final indestructible definitions and principles of Americanization and what are to be its finally approved methods. So early in the experiment the answers can only be postulated.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men , War , People , Star

“Yes, I repeat it: it's society that makes criminals and you jurymen, rather than striking them, you should use your intelligence and your powers to transform society. At once you would suppress all crime; and your work, in attacking the causes, would be greater and more fecund than your justice that limits itself to punishing the effects.”

Ravachol (1859–1892) French anarchist

Oui, je le répète : c'est la société qui fait les criminels, et vous jurés, au lieu de les frapper, vous devriez employer votre intelligence et vos forces à transformer la société. Du coup, vous supprimeriez tous les crimes ; et votre œuvre, en s'attaquant aux causes, serait plus grande et plus féconde que n'est votre justice qui s'amoindrit à punir les effets.
Trial statement

Justice

“Every time there's a major intelligence failure there's talk about a makeover. But, every time there's talk about a makeover, it's transmuted into warnings about a takeover.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

Failure , Time

“Earlier this evening, President Obama called to inform me that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda network that attacked America on September 11, 2001. I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude. This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks on the death of Osama bin Laden, May 5, 2011, The Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2011 http://web.archive.org/web/20110505081437/http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-death-obama-george-w-bush.html,
2010s, 2011

Love , Women , Men , People

“Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVIII.

Men , Family , Appearance

“I wish to guard the Principle of Vision from certain misconceptions which might arise on a simple statement of it. The principle insists on the artist assuring himself that he distinctly sees what he attempts to represent. What he sees, and how he represents it, depend on other principles. To make even this principle of Vision thoroughly intelligible in its application to all forms of Literature and Art, it must be considered in connection with the two other principles — Sincerity and Beauty, which are involved in all successful works.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Beauty , Art , Literature , Success

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan http://dieoff.org/page125.htm
Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

Sense

“The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter.”

F. Lee Bailey (1933) American lawyer

Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1972.

Guy , Thinking

“[T]he intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and … most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real Negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Color , Personality

“My interaction with the Himalayan tribespeople overturned my pre-conceptions. There was no superior or inferior being. I was just a human being like them […] I lived with people who had no electricity or cars and yet they lived very fulfilling lives. They had no schools but they were very intelligent people. I became even more thirsty to understand and learn more about the tribes people of the world.”

Stephen Corry (1951) British anthropologist and activist

An insight into the life of Stephen Corry http://www.mmegi.bw/2004/March/Thursday18/90140841657.html, Mmegi Online. March 18, 2004

People , World , School , Cars

“No Bolshevik, no Communist, no intelligent socialist has ever entertained the idea of violence against the middle peasants. All socialists have always spoken of agreement with them and of their gradual and voluntary transition to socialism.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Reply to a Peasant’s Question" (15 February 1919) http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/feb/14b.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 501.
1910s

Idea

“We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name.”

John Erskine (1879–1951) American educator

Source: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), pp. 26-27

Love , Life , God , Problem

“In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

World , Reality

“Convergence is, in my opinion, not only deeply fascinating but, curiously, it is as often overlooked. More importantly, it hints at the existence of a deeper structure to biology. It helps us to delineate a metaphorical map across which evolution must navigate. In this sense the Darwinian mechanisms and the organic substrate we call life are really a search engine to discover particular solutions, including intelligence and—risky thought—perhaps deeper realities?”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Astronomy and Geophysics: Vol. 46, No. 4: "Aliens like us?"
Miscellaneous

Life , Search , Reality , Sense

“Let us beware of irony when making judgements. Of all the dispositions of the mind, irony is the least intelligent.”

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) French literary critic

Gardons-nous de l'ironie en jugeant. De toutes les dispositions de l'esprit, l'ironie est la moins intelligente.
Notebook entry, February 24, 1848, cited from Les cahiers de Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1876) p. 75; Christopher Prendergast The Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 244.

“In the mind perfect intelligence flourished and reigned, uprightness attended as its companion, and all the senses were prepared and moulded for due obedience to reason; and in the body there was a suitable correspondence with this internal order. But now, although some obscure lineaments of that image are found remaining in us; yet are they so vitiated and maimed, that they may truly be said to be destroyed. For besides the deformity which everywhere appears unsightly, this evil also is added, that no part is free from the infection of sin.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Commentary on Genesis 1. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.vii.i.html, (1554)
Genesis (1554)

Sense , Appearance , Evil , Parting

“In this fact we have reached the essential form of every spirit or person — the organic union of the particular with the universal, of its private self-activity in the recognition of itself with its public activity in the recognition of all others. That is, self-consciousness is in the last resort a conscience, or the union of each spirit's self-recognition with recognition of all. Its self-definition is therefore definite, in both senses of the word: it is at once integral in its thorough and inconfusible difference from every other, and yet it is integral in terms of the entire whole that includes it with all the rest. Thus in both of its aspects — and both are essential to it — in a commanding sense it excludes alternative, and there is universal determinism, that is, universal and stable definiteness, just because there is universal self-determination, or genuine freedom. But this universal self-defining implies and proclaims the universal reality, the living presence in all, of one unchangeable type of being — the self-conscious intelligence; and this, presented in all really possible forms, or instances, of its one abiding nature.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.353-4

Nature , Reality , Sense , Freedom

“Some of my readers may find themselves thinking that the mere fact that millions of human beings, including many highly intelligent and deeply thoughtful ones, have had strongly held religious beliefs is itself a reason for giving them serious intellectual attention — not necessarily for believing them, of course, but for finding them interesting and for treating them with respect. I would agree with this if the reasons given for them commanded respect. But I have yet to encounter such reasons. What are claimed as proofs are not proofs, and all such "proofs" have long since been discredited, the most important of them by Christians themselves, such as Kant. Yet they go on being trotted out: assertions are made without evidence; mutually contradictory claims proliferate; historical knowledge is defied; mistranslations abound; language is used in a way that slithers unacknowledged between literal meaning and metaphor; the whole vocabulary rests on unsecured presuppositions. Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.”

Bryan Magee (1930–2019) British politician

Source: Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), p. 346

Religion , Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“The air is pure and serene, lit by a light Divine, and by it we shall discover, fix, and contemplate the eternal Truth, with purified and illuminated eyes. There, too, all things are transformed, are one only Truth, one only image in the mirror of the Wisdom of God; and God created us that we might find, know, and possess this image in our essence and the Purity of our intelligence. Contemplating, applying our minds to this in the Divine Light, with simple and spiritual eyes, we attain to contemplative life.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 149

Life , Wisdom , God , Truth

“These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 21 (p. 454)

Women , Men , Question

“Idiots are really
one hundred per cent
when they are also
intelligent.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

The Final Touch : Portrait of nobody in particular
Grooks

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn't help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice."”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Commonwealth Club speech

Help , Baby

“I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.”

Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Hope

“What does matter is this: the Russians successfully meddled in our democracy, and our intelligence agencies have concluded that they will do so again.”

Adam Schiff (1960) American politician

Open Letter to the Committee Hearing Re: FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers

Democracy

“A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Way , Understanding , Thinking

“1945
As the Allies rummages through documents in the wreckage of defeated Germany, evidence of the influence of the “Protocols” was found by American Intelligence.
Allied soldier: Hey, Sarge whatcha got there?
Sarge: Wow!! Joseph Goebbels’ private diaries! Look at this…volume 13…here’s a translation.
I have devoted exhaustive study to the Protocols of Zion. In the past objection was always made that they were not suited to present day propaganda. In reading them now I find that we can use them very well. The Protocols of Zion are as modern today as they were when published the first time! At noon I mentioned this to the Fuhrer. He believed the protocols to be absolutely genuine!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.110

Study , Time , Reading , Past

“A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Dreams

“Since 1914…I wait for the natural to return; for newspapers to report news with care for accuracy and grammar; for schools to teach and for pupils to study; for faces to be sane and intelligent, and even humorous; for American artists and poets and writers to be exuberant and optimistic…it is all gone with the music of Vienna and the gaiety of San Francisco. But I still see everything against that background, and really I see nothing funny anywhere. The Beatnik beard and the mini skirt and the topless waitress, they ARE funny, I know they are funny but they only make me tired, I don't laugh.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

letter to Roger MacBride (March 5, 1968).
reflecting her impressions of the world of 1968, at the age of 81.

School , Music , Nature , Study

“I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Chuckles) Did I say that? I guess I did.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

Quote from her 2009 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans

Life , Hope , Universe , Sea

“The Rifles were a new kind of regiment, prizing skill and intelligence above blind discipline.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Prey (2001)

“It seems to me that the technique of gaming does at least two things, both of which are extremely important. One is that it tends to make a reality out of the potential and also the intentions nominally ascribed to the enemy. I have had the privilege of studying over the years a number of so-called "strategic studies," and I have often been amazed at the degree to which they are permeated by what one can only call "wishful thinking." There will often be on the first page a list of stated assumptions or postulates which will say something like the following: "(1) The enemy is very intelligent; (2) He has the initiative." When you turn the pages, however, the enemy has ceased to be intelligent, and he has also ceased to have initiative. War gaming does not let you get away with that.”

Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) American nuclear strategist

Strategy as an Art and a Science http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/theorists/brodie1.htm,1959

War , Game , Thinking , Reality

“The sad fact is that not only is the youth exposed to rock, but rock is coming into the church. So called Christian rock; and it’s being sung by the choir. You actually hear now and then about a rock mass or a rock service. I spoke a few years ago at a church which was…I’ll never be asked about. A very large church with a plant that was equal to a small college campus, and I don’t mean too small of a college, a fair sized one. They had a number of choirs; they had one man in charge of all the music in the church, overall music director, a very brilliant, very intelligent man, but as wrongheaded as I’ve ever seen. Because he told me that his belief was that the only kind of music that should be played or sung or used in a church or any place was throw away music; that was his term. Music that was hip, so up to the moment, that it would capture the mood of the youth who were listening to the latest on television or radio. Music which six months down the line would be out of date because it would be throw away music, music of the moment, in order to speak to the youth. And I tried to get through this point to him, that speaking to them in terms of what’s of the moment is not what it’s all about it, it’s speaking from the Lord with eternal truths.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

Truth , Youth , Sadness , Music

“The voice is an aid to intelligence.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“Students, young people, have the right to join together in order to guide their efforts towards a common goal, and they will use this right. As for their goal, it is simple: for them it is a matter of ensuring that the July revolution is not a lie; every edifice built by the Empire and the Restoration must be overthrown, and since not one single stone of this edifice is yet to fall, they will work indefatigably to demolish and destroy it. We call for the destruction of the university. We call for the destruction of the country’s most odious and harmful monopoly, of that which stifles civilization at its source and which is the cruellest insult inflicted on human intelligence.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Declaration of the Provisional Committee for Schools" (1831)

People , Lie , Effort , Universe

“Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

Passion , Madness

“Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 78

“For mankind may survive and live without machines, and still be civilised. But without compassion, the human race can only elaborate upon the futile cunning and the barren intelligence of the great apes.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

“Just as vision is inseparable from our spiritual intelligence, our capacity to handle ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity is bound up with our emotional intelligence.”

Danah Zohar (1945) American writer

Danah Zohar (1997) Using the New Science to Rethink How We Structure and Lead Organizations. p. 14.

“Fathers are the geniuses of the house because only a person as intelligent as we could fake such stupidity.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Himself (1983)

Stupidity , Housing , Personality

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

“When serious scientists with huge beards aren't looking, I jocularly refer to these fossils as my alien goldfish. Picture the scene: the giant spaceship is parked on a wide beach, and kicking pebbles Commodore Grafnik is in a filthy mood. Yet another planet with hundreds of millions of years to go before intelligence evolves, not even at the zorkquaan stage, for Threga's sake! And as for his pet vlantans!! Purchased at huge expense, all they do is feed voraciously and then fall asleep. Still fuming, Grafnik carries the bowl down to the lagoon edge and (contrary to every regulation in the AIPC [Access to Inhabited Planets Code]) tips the vlantans out. They dart away and several months later enter the fossil record of a planet where they have no right to be.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Astronomy and Geophysics: Vol. 46, No. 4: "Aliens like us?"
Miscellaneous

Mood

“The reason Smolin's idea is interesting is that it may answer the challenge, "The universe is too good to be true. It looks like a put-up job." But, note that the Smolin hypothesis cannot be used to account in particular for the BIOLOGICAL part of that "too good to be true". Smolinian selection may account for the fact that our universe has the necessary constants, dimensionality and laws to last for last for a long time (not fizzle out or crunch immediately its initiating bang), long enough to spawn daughter universes (and INCIDENTALLY long enough to breed life). But Smolinian selection cannot account for the fact that our universe is specifically congenial to life, or to intelligent life, or to us. My negative conclusion would break down only if life itself is in the habit of engineering the spawning of daughter universes. As far as I am aware, this hasn't been suggested, but it is, I suppose, a theoretical possibility that daughter universes are generated as a consequence of the fooling around of highly evolved physicists.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins, "Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" https://www.edge.org/conversation/science-delusion-and-the-appetite-for-wonder, John Brockman, Edge.org, 1.2.97.

Life , Law , Fools , Idea

“People are jumping on [veganism] slowly but surely, but I think it’s cool. I think you’re a smarter and more intelligent fighter. Me and my brother are at the top of the game and have been for a long time. We’re obviously doing something right. Besides knowing how to kick somebody in the head, you should know how to feel good tomorrow. … I like to promote the vegan industry. I hear a lot of criticism from people saying you need meat to be strong and for recovery, and it’s a bunch of bullshit, because I train harder than everybody. It’s so easy to argue with these people. I’m like, ‘Dude, have you done a tenth of what I’ve done?”

Nate Diaz (1985) American mixed martial artist

"Why UFC’s Toughest Fighters Are Going Vegan" https://www.mensjournal.com/sports/nate-diaz-and-other-vegan-ufc-fighters-w199323/, interview with Men's Journal (March 2016)

People , Feeling , Game , Thinking

“Even if man were created a carnivorous animal, is there no way for him to outgrow it as he becomes more intelligent?”

Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (1844–1936) German religious movement founder

Source: Mazdaznan Dietetics and Cookery Book (1913), p. 197

Way , Animals

“I exhibited three paintings at the Salon d'Automne exhibition [Paris], which is the most interesting exhibition I have seen until now. Much more interesting than the Secession [in München]. My paintings [two words cancelled] were noticed and praised by the art critics. I think I will be very famous here in a few years time. Reading my name in the newspapers and seeing people notice my paintings and write about them has given me new and strange joy. – Paris is a beautiful city. Why do you remain in the monotony of Munich's heavy atmosphere? Here one can find everything one desires. Everything is refined and has spirit and everyday one learns something new.. The French are more intelligent than I thought. They laugh a lot, but they understand better than the Germans what is refined, strange and outside the ordinary.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Paris, 8 Oct. 1912; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO TO FRITZ GARTZ, PARIS, 1912-1914 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/576-579Metafisica7_8.pdf, p. 576
1908 - 1920

People , Beauty , Art , Understanding

“By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind… and in the leisure… his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity… and… arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

p, 125
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom , Age , Religion , History

“But in their second-best rank, books of this academic sort are, of all books, the easiest to write. They chew over what has already been well chewed; they grapple with other scholars, seeking to bear them down into the academic ooze; they explore the vast caverns of the creator's spirit with no illumination save the smoky and fitful rushlight of their own critical intelligence.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books

“But in adversity, intelligence alone cannot sustain hope. Ultimately, hope can be sustained only by finding purpose in adversity, by imposing a pattern on the fortuitous disasters of existence. Human beings, if force to it, will compromise their intelligence to preserve their hope.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

Hope

“Christian conservatives are claiming that the hit documentary March of the Penguins supports the theory of intelligent design. Meanwhile, backers of evolution claim that intelligent design is refuted in the documentary March of the Bonaduces.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/05/05aupdate.phtml
Weekend Update samples

Support

“No more would I go along with Plato in exiling the poets, who play on the limbic cortex. Not even they are powerful enough to evoke the whole of man. If we are to survive our own destruction of our world and of ourselves by our advance of culture we had better learn soon to modify our genes to make us more intelligent. It is our last chance, that by increasing our diversity we may be able to make some sort of man that can survive without an ecological niche on this our earth. We may be able to live in gas masks and eat algae and distill the ocean.
I doubt that we have time enough.

We are, I think, nearing the end of a course that left the main line of evolution to overspecialize in brain to its own undoing.
Time will tell.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

Source: Embodiments of Mind, (1965), p. 347 cited in: Roberto Moreno-Díaz, José Mira, Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1996) Brain processes, theories, and models: an international conference in honor of W.S. McCulloch 25 years after his death. p. 9

World , Thinking , Learning , Chance

“It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 42-43

Life , Sense , Personality

“No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to Fr. Pastells (4 April 1893)

God , Idea , Light , Distant

“A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Imagination , Understanding , Knowledge , Passion

“Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that are based on its five elements: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships”

Daniel Goleman (1946) American psychologist & journalist

Source: Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998), p. 24

Motivation , Learning

“Scientific knowledge helps us mainly because it makes the wonder to which we are called by nature rather more intelligible.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Die Wissenschaft hilft uns vor allem, daß sie das Staunen, wozu wir von Natur berufen find.
Maxim 417, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Nature , Knowledge , Help

“Among the names of those who have led the great advance of the industrial arts during the past thirty years, that of Frederick Winslow Taylor will hold an increasingly high place. Others have led in electrical development, in the steel industry, in industrial chemistry, in railroad equipment, in the textile arts, and in many other fields, but he has been the creator of a new science, which underlies and will benefit all of these others by greatly increasing their efficiency and augmenting their productivity. In addition, he has literally forged a new tool for the metal trades, which has doubled, or even trebled, the productive capacity of nearly all metal-cutting machines. Either achievement would entitle him to high rank among the notable men of his day; — the two combined give him an assured place among the world's leaders in the industrial arts.
Others without number have been organizers of industry and commerce, each working out, with greater or less success, the solution of his own problems, but none perceiving that many of these problems involved common factors and thus implied the opportunity and the need of an organized science. Mr. Taylor was the first to grasp this fact and to perceive that in this field, as in the physical sciences, the Baconian system could be applied, that a practical science could be created by following the three principles of that system, viz.: the correct and complete observation oi facts, the intelligent and unbiased analysis of such facts, and the formulating of laws by deduction from the results so reached. Not only did he comprehend this fundamental conception and apply it; he also grasped the significance and possibilities of the problem so fully that his codification of the fundamental principles of the system he founded is practically complete and will be a lasting monument to its founder.”

Henry R. Towne (1844–1924) American engineer

Henry R. Towne, in: Frank Barkley Copley, Frederick W. Taylor, father of scientific management https://archive.org/stream/frederickwtaylor01copl, 1923. p. xii.

Men , World , Law , Art

“Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture… American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Duck Dynasty: A Decoy For Dummies" http://www.americandailyherald.com/pundits/ilana-mercer/item/duck-dynasty-a-decoy-for-dummies, American Daily Herald, December 27, 2013.
2010s, 2013

Religion , Feeling , Light , Country

“We can argue about their intelligence (which we would likely define in human-centric terms anyway), their ability to understand human language, or even the extent to which they really understand and know the world around them, but there’s no argument that can convincingly show that animals don’t feel pain, and that they have no interest in avoiding that pain. If anything, animals are more sensitive to the world around them than we are, given their heightened sensory abilities.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 25

Pain , World , Feeling , Understanding

“You can only say Darwinian causes -- random mutation, natural selection -- even gravity is supposed to be done by that! And I would say to these people, well, how did life begin? We don't know, but it had to be by Darwinian means. Well, how did gravity begin? We don't know, but it had to be by Darwinian means. Why did it have to be that way? Why couldn't there have been an intelligent designer?”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

YouTube -- Ben Stein discusses the "Expelled" documentary, Fox News: Intelligent Journey -- Stein's New Documentary, 14 April 2008, 2008-04-23 http://youtube.com/watch?v=ck3AgSAXIgo,

Life , People , Way , Nature

“To depend on others for salvation is negative, but to depend on oneself is positive. Dependence on others means surrendering one's intelligence and efforts.”

K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera (1919–2006) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

"No Self Surrender"
What Buddhists Believe (1993)

Effort , Dependency

“Artificial intelligence is a trending development across the globe and Taiwan has an advantage in development because of its strong semiconductor industry, which offers easier access to equipment and computer chips.”

Chen Liang-gee (1956) politician

Chen Liang-gee (2017) cited in " INTERVIEW: Science minister wants to attract 3,000 AI experts http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2017/07/23/2003675138" on Taipei Times, 23 July 2017

Strong

“The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Introduction
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

Men , Exercises , Courage , Support

“I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected contingencies. The optimal way to deal with this is not to give up in despair, but to move ahead using the best intelligence and resources that we have to overcome adversity.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Quoted in: Dave Lane (2008) Isn't Religion Weird? Quotations for Atheists, p. 117

Life , Way , Optimism , Problem

Quotes about intelligence page 12

Quotes about intelligence
page 12