“Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.”
#107
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
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James Richardson 89
American poet 1950Related quotes

“Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.”
Act 2, sc. 3
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

[Mahmoud al-Zahar, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041602899.html, No Peace Without Hamas, Washington Post, April 17, 2008, February 25, 2014]

2000s, 2001, A Great People Has Been Moved to Defend a Great Nation (September 2001)

Disputed
Original: (la) Qui se ultro morti offerant facilius reperiuntur quam qui dolorem patienter ferant.
Quoted in many works without citation

Source: 1860s, Last public address (1865)
Context: The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, "Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?" "Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State government?"

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.

Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)