Quotes about intelligence

What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.

...no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.

“Intelligence” demands the most strict of definitions, since the word is easily and often abused. Intelligence rates the quality of Gaean man’s competence at altering environment to suit his convenience, or, more generally, the solution of problems. The corollaries to the idea are several. Among them: In the absence of problems, intelligence cannot be measured. A creature with a large, complicated brain is not necessarily intelligent. Raw abstract intelligence is a meaningless concept.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

A complex mind. All great criminals have that.

Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.

The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.

Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definitions.

Intelligence takes chance with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.