“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.”
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.
“The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.”
“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.”
“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.”
“A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.”
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
“There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.”
“I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense I call it intelligence.”
“Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.”
“I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.”
“Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.”
“The higher the general average of intelligence, all things else being equal, the less the disposition to be meddlesome, critical, and overbearing.”
“I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans, they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose, they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion, they just have another type of intelligence.”
“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”
“The right of each individual in any relation to secure to himself the full benefits of his intelligence, his capacity, his industry and skill are among the inalienable inheritances of humanity.”
“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”