“Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.”

Source: Extras

Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 230
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Variant: Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

Source: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

La passion qui, remarquez-le, porte son esprit avec elle, peut donner aux niais, aux sots, aux imbéciles une sorte d’intelligence, surtout pendant la jeunesse.
Source: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. IX.

Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002)
Context: We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.