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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.

Random quote on Intelligence

Most quoted on intelligence:

The surest way to be deceived is to think oneself more clever than others.

François de La Rochefoucauld

When the best way to the Governor’s favour was to be intelligent, intelligence would become the fashion.

W. Somerset Maugham

It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

George Orwell

The three greatest mistakes that can be made [are] lack of intelligence, lack of resolution, or lack of responsibility.

Thucydides

For the eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Thomas Carlyle

It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

Simone Weil Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986)

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

G. K. Chesterton

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

Eric Hoffer The Temper of Our Time (1967)

There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.

George Steiner Extraterritorial (1971)

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

G. K. Chesterton Heretics (1905)

The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.

Denis Dutton

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

Albert Einstein

No people has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellectuals more than the British.

Leonard Woolf

The more you observe nature, the more you perceive that there is tremendous organization in all things. It is an intelligence so great that just by observing natural phenomena I come to the conclusion that a Creator exists.

Carlo Rubbia

Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab (1813)

As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard.

Charles Sheffield The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

He's not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.

Peggy Noonan

There is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

Edward Said

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong.

Karl Popper On Freedom (1958)

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