“Intelligence won wars, not brute force.”
Rick Riordan book The Staff of Serapis
Source: The Staff of Serapis
Source: The Ruins of Gorlan
“Intelligence won wars, not brute force.”
Rick Riordan book The Staff of Serapis
Source: The Staff of Serapis
“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist
“An intelligent person should never resolve a dispute with brute force.”
Gersh Budker (1918–1977) Soviet physicist
as quoted by R. Z. Sagdeev in [G.I. Budker: reflections & remembrances, by Boris N. Breizman, Springer, 1993, http://books.google.com/books?id=e0bxFrmNtykC&pg=RA1-PA306, 1-56396-070-2, 306]
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces”
Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
Context: Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world.<!--p.4
Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit
as well as at the higher levels of military command
Source: 2000s, Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (2002), p. 196
Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light
Seed of Light (1959)
William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: The clock runs down. I lift the weight by exerting the proper amount of energy, and in this action the law of conservation of energy is strictly obeyed. But now I have the choice of either letting the weight fall free in a fraction of a second, or, constrained by the wheelwork, in twenty-four hours. I can do which I like, and whichever way I decide, no more energy is developed in the fall of the weight. I strike a match; I can use it to light a cigarette or to set fire to a house. I write a telegram; it may be simply to say I shall be late for dinner, or it may produce fluctuations on the stock exchange that will ruin thousands. In these cases the actual force required in striking the match or in writing the telegram is governed by the law or conservation of energy; but the vastly more momentous part, which determines the words I use or the material I ignite, is beyond such a law. It is probable that no expenditure of energy need be used in the determination of direction one way more than another. Intelligence and free will here come into play, and these mystic forces are outside the law of conservation of energy as understood by physicists.
André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist
“An Unprejudiced Mind,” pp. 311-312
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)