Intelligence Quotes

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form."
-Albert Einstein

"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."
-Socrates

"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't."
-George Bernard Shaw

"In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture."
-Henri Bergson

"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell."
-Simone Weil

"Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them."
-Frank Moore Colby

"The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence."
-Robert J. Shiller

"There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence."
-John Calvin

"There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence."
-Henry Adams

"Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare."
-Harriet Martineau

"Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor."
-Lazarus Long

"One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence."
-Lewis Mumford

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat."
-Richard Hofstadter

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."
-Henrik Tikkanen

"I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic."
-Lisa Alther

"The universe is an intelligence test."
-Timothy Leary

"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have."
-Don Herold

"Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness."
-John Sterling

"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity."
-Konrad Adenauer

"You can have all the intelligence in the world and don't have enough stamina. I have seen some very bright, bright women who do not have the stamina for husbands."
-Charleszetta Waddles

"An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it."
-Laurence J. Peter

"They have a tourniquet on the brain."
-Robert Duvall

"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done."
-Linus Torvalds

"Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are."
-George Santayana

"Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen."
-John Ciardi

"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that."
-G. H. Hardy

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
-Arthur C. Clarke

"A mind too active is no mind at all."
-Theodore Roethke