149 Intelligence Quotes

Intelligence is a multifaceted gem that has fascinated thinkers, leaders, and creatives for centuries. It manifests in various forms, from academic brilliance to emotional insight and street smarts. Whether you're looking for inspiration, wisdom, or a new perspective, our curated collection of the top 149 intelligence quotes offers a treasure trove of profound insights. These quotes, drawn from some of the brightest minds in history, aim to challenge your thinking, inspire growth, and spark meaningful conversations. Join us on this journey through the minds of geniuses and discover the true essence of intelligence.

1. “Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.” - Aldous Huxley

2. “The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.” - Alister McGrath

3. “I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” - Oscar Wilde

4. “I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” - Douglas Adams

5. “Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing.” - William H. Calvin

6. “My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]” - Arthur C. Clarke

7. “In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.” - Ambrose Bierce

8. “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” - Andrew Jackson

9. “If reason ruled the world would history even exist?” - Ryszard Kapuściński

10. “An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.” - Albert Camus

11. “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” - Bertrand Russell

12. “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

13. “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

14. “These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” - Abigail Adams

15. “I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments.” - Jim Morrison

16. “Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

17. “The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.” - John Keats

18. “You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.” - Philip Roth

19. “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” - Martin Luther

20. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

21. “At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's.” - James Gould Cozzens

22. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” - Edgar Allan Poe

23. “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” - Marie Curie

24. “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

25. “A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise. ” - William Makepeace Thackeray

26. “The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer … They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth … [Then the Creator said]: 'They know all … what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!… Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?” - Anonymous

27. “Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.” - Neal Stephenson

28. “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” - Molière

29. “Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.” - Isaac Asimov

30. “Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.” - Lemony Snicket

31. “[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

32. “This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.” - P.G. Wodehouse

33. “Every true genius is bound to be naive.” - Friedrich Schiller

34. “He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.” - Rush Limbaugh

35. “Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not. ” - Douglas Hofstadter

36. “A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.” - Jonathan Stroud

37. “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.” - Junot Diaz

38. “We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.” - Will Cuppy

39. “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.” - Stephen Hawking

40. “Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

41. “L'Homme a arrêté son évolution après avoir inventé la roue et l'air climatisé.” - Mike Resnick

42. “Il ne faut pas désespérer les imbéciles, avec un peu d'entraînement on peut en faire des militaires.” - Pierre Desproges

43. “Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.” - Bertrand Russell

44. “Genius is independent of situation.” - Charles Churchill

45. “Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.” - Wilkie Collins

46. “This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.” - Susan Jacoby

47. “I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.” - Carl Sagan

48. “Intelligence without wisdom brings destruction.” - Erol Ozan

49. “I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)” - Elizabeth Peters

50. “You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.” - Oscar Wilde

51. “Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue” - Tobsha Learner

52. “My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.” - Diane Setterfield

53. “Deep” to me connotes intellectual rigor, not fashionable obscurity or the unnecessarily academic.” - Alex Payne

54. “How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.” - Ignazio Silone

55. “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” - Bertrand Russell

56. “What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock."Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

57. “What they might lack in intelligence, they make up for with sheer quantities of high explosive.” - Simon Morden

58. “But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.” - Muriel Barbery

59. “When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied.” - Herophilus

60. “Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty.” - Toba Beta

61. “If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?” - Frans de Waal

62. “To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.” - Robert K. Massie

63. “A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.” - Tana French

64. “Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.” - Wei Hui

65. “The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about.” - Eileen Cook

66. “He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.” - Alain De Botton

67. “The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.” - Oscar Wilde

68. “He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.” - Alain De Botton

69. “However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

70. “In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.” - Aberjhani

71. “The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.” - W.H. Auden

72. “He turned to Miss Minerva. "I'm relying on you, at any rate. You've got a good mind. Anybody can see that.""Thank you," she said."As good as a man's," he added."Oh, now you've spoiled it!” - Earl Derr Biggers

73. “I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place” - Howard Gardner

74. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” - George Orwell

75. “One will abide, and will confess that another is nobler than he, that another is richer, more handsome, and even that he is more learned, but that another is richer in reason scarcely any will confess: Rare is he who will concede genius.” - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

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

77. “Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.” - Stephen Baker

78. “Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” - Criss Jami

79. “Intuition is the highest form of intelligence, transcending all individual abilities and skills” - Sylvia Clare

80. “Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?” - H. Rider Haggard

81. “What are wits for unless a man uses them?” - Ellis Peters

82. “Intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.” - Daniel Keyes

83. “Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.” - Tom Sharpe

84. “Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?” - Orhan Pamuk

85. “Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.” - Paul Lockhart

86. “I am not the sharpest knife in the knife-thing.” - Jimmy Dore

87. “Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.Or insanity.” - Richard Kadrey

88. “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.” - Samuel Johnson

89. “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” - Johannes Kepler

90. “Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed."It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said.""Who?""You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'.""Homer?""No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key.” - Stephen Fry

91. “I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.” - Susan Sontag

92. “Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough tomake them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or haveThings of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those thatare full of precious Drugs.They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and levelDwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of theWinds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings haveneed of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to theWeather.” - William Penn

93. “Wer kann es sagen, wer nur ahnen, wie weit das Geistesvermögen der Tiere geht!” - E.T.A. Hoffmann

94. “It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.” - Steven Weinberg

95. “Enough about my beauty," Buttercup said. "Everybody always talks about how beautiful I am. I've got a mind, Westley. Talk about that.” - William Goldman

96. “I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.” - Peter Bognanni

97. “Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

98. “Muscle is good, but craft is better” - Wace

99. “It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

100. “The barrier during self-improvement is not so much that we hate learning, rather we hate being taught. To learn entails that the knowledge was achieved on one's own accord - it feels great - but to be taught often leaves a feeling of inferiority. Thus it takes a bit of determination and a lot of humility in order for one to fully develop.” - Criss Jami

101. “He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.” - Jack London

102. “A ști anumite lucruri pe de rost îți conferă capacitatea unei înțelegeri superioare.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

103. “I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

104. “Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can't.” - Nicole Williams

105. “Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don't we do something about natural stupidity?” - Steve Polyak

106. “Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.” - Idries Shah

107. “Intelligence is naked without wisdom. Wisdom dresses interestingly with intelligence.” - Santosh Kalwar

108. “Mobs have passions, not brains.” - Dan Simmons

109. “She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing ore than to challenge herself with more complex parts--and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature....Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it.” - J. Randy Taraborrelli

110. “Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since” - Kim Stanley Robinson

111. “I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

112. “Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.” - Tammara Webber

113. “But I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligent and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn...Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love...Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.” - Daniel Keyes

114. “In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.” - Henry Kissinger

115. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.” - Helen Keller

116. “Some were made with skill and intelligenceSome with passion and charmBut they, they were raw, and strived to remain so…” - Pearl Pandya

117. “And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.” - Mark Haddon

118. “I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.” - Criss Jami

119. “Sono così intelligente che a volte non capisco una sola parola di quel che sto dicendo.” - Oscar Wilde

120. “A consciência da insonsciência da vida é o mais antigo imposto à inteligência.” - Fernando Pessoa

121. “But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.” - Peter Watts

122. “Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!” - Albert Einstein

123. “You don’t get to have an opinion on whether .999… is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they’ve figured out.” - John Green

124. “Karl was no glamour boy. But even during this first meeting I discovered he had something better. The kind of intelligence that's more attractive than physical beauty.” - Aidan Chambers

125. “Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.” - Richard John Neuhaus

126. “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” - Henry James Sr.

127. “Più intelligenza avrai, più soffrirai.” - Schopenhauer, Arthur

128. “It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used, than a powerful one that is idle.” - Bryant McGill

129. “Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.” - Bryant McGill

130. “Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.” - Orson Scott Card

131. “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” - Alan Alda

132. “Intelligence is not measured by the mind's ability to compute, but by the heart's will to contrive.” - Kimberly Stedronsky

133. “We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.” - Roland Barthes

134. “Mojawapo ya misingi ya ujasusi ni kuwa na uwezo wa kutofautisha kati ya unachojua, usichojua na unachofikiria. Unaweza kusema unajua wakati hujui. Maamuzi yasiyo sahihi ya kijasusi huweza kuiletea tume madhara makubwa.” - Enock Maregesi

135. “It is not many things that modern psychology agress upon, but all the different approaches of psychology agrees on one thing: that people in groups become more stupid. Individually people are more intelligent, because they have to take their own responsibility, but in a group they do not have to take the same responsibility. The two basic power strategies to try to manipulate and gain control over another person are: silencing and attacking. Silencing means to not listen to, to exclude or ignore and not respect a person. Attack can both mean to attack a person directly or to try to discredit a person through lies, to ridicule a person or by spreading malicious rumours. All organizations are more or less dysfunctional. In a dysfunctional group, the members of the group play three different roles: agressor, denier and victim. The agressor is the role that attack and ridicule people, the denier never knows what is going on, there is “no body at home”, and the victim is the resultat of these two roles. It is always easier to follow a group without awareness, than to follow your own heart, to trust your own intelligence, love, truth, silence and creativity.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

136. “She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.” - Andrea Dworkin

137. “I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.” - Sarah Vowell

138. “You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.” - Frank McCourt

139. “In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain't many!” - Ken Kesey

140. “Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.” - Criss Jami

141. “For it was intelligence that was the thin line between endearing rapscallion and idiot bastard. - Éibhear the Contemptible” - G.A. Aiken

142. “Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” - Hedy Lamarr

143. “The intelligent have plans; the wise have principles.” - Raheel Farooq

144. “An egoist is always intelligent, never wise.” - Raheel Farooq

145. “There is no battle or engagement with any institution, company or government; it is always an engagement of ideas.” - Bryant McGill

146. “One’s opinion should only be as strong as one’s knowledge on the matter.” - Eric Hirzel

147. “العبقري يخترق حجاب المألوف .. ويخرج من أسْر العادة .!” - مصطفى محمود

148. “and yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.” - Herman Melville

149. “Your personal declaration of will is the first step in a seemingly impossible journey.” - Bryant McGill