“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?”
Intelligence comes in more flavors than IQ tests can measure. These quotes explore different kinds of smarts — emotional, creative, street, academic — and the humbling realization that the smartest people are usually the ones who know how much they do not know.
“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”
“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?”
“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.”
“There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.”
“If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.”
“I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.”
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
“Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.”
“Wit is educated insolence.”
“The war on terror, I believe, will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.”
“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”
“Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.”
“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
“Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.”
“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”
“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”