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Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.

— Alfred Binet Les idées modernes sur les enfants (1909)

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Intelligence

More quotes by Alfred Binet

Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.

The mechanical conception of the universe is nothing but naïve realism.

We are, for the rest, so wrapped up in sensations that none of our boldest conceptions can break through the circle.

Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them.

The world is but an assembly of present, past, and possible sensations; the affair of science is to analyze and co-ordinate them by separating their accidental from their constant relations.

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Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred Binet (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.