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Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

— Marvin Minsky

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Intelligence

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

The Society of Mind (1987)

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected.

The Society of Mind (1987)

There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version.

Perceptrons (1988)

Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

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)

Attribution

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