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Intelligence Quotes

Emerson leads this page, followed by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Isaac D’Israeli, the American humorist Josh Billings and Simone Weil. For sourced lines there is Disraeli, in Contarini Fleming (1832), saying patience is a necessary ingredient of genius, and Emerson in English Traits (1856), remarking that the hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

Three popular lines carry flags. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent” is credited to Einstein and marked misattributed. A line about the centuries rarely producing a genius, credited to David Lloyd George, is also marked misattributed. William Feather’s remark that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person is disputed.

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Most quoted on intelligence:

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

Joseph Addison

A host is like a general: calamities often reveal his genius.

Horace Satires (-35)

I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession.

Aleister Crowley

The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

Wendell Berry The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996)

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel Journal Intime (1882)

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

George Henry Lewes The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years.

Wilhelm Frick

Lee is the greatest military genius in America, myself not excepted.

Winfield Scott Life of General Robert Edmund Lee (1870)

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

Benjamin Disraeli Endymion (1880)

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

Charles Caleb Colton Lacon (1820)

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, Volume II (1840)

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Herman Melville Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

Denis Diderot Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980)

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

Stephen Jay Gould The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Genius begins great works, labor alone finishes them.

Joseph Joubert Pearls of Thought (1881)

An idiot is no smarter if a billion people agree with him and a genius is no dumber if a billion people don't.

Jonah Goldberg Jersey Dems vs. Democracy (2002)

Genius consists of equal parts of natural aptitude and hard work.

André Maurois A Time for Silence (1942)

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

An Wang Lessons : An Autobiography (1986)

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

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