Intelligence Quotes

1. "I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."
Author: Aldrich Ames

2. "Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

3. "You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment."
Author: Alvin Toffler

4. "Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals."
Author: Amit Kalantri

5. "Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women."
Author: Andrea Dworkin

6. "Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself."
Author: Ann Patchett

7. "Si le sentiment est l´intelligence du coeur, l´émotion est la stupidité du coeur."
Author: Arnaud Desjardins

8. "I don't know wheter I am getting older and more demanding, or whether the human race is degenerating, but the world didn't seem to be so barren of intelligence in my youth."
Author: Ayn Rand

9. "L'amour, c'est la victoire de l'imagination sur l'intelligence."
Author: Bernard Werber

10. "We have an incredible warrior class in this country - people in law enforcement, intelligence - and I thank God every night we have them standing fast to protect us from the tremendous amount of evil that exists in the world."
Author: Brad Thor

11. "I believe emotional suppression fueled by a shamed imagination lies at the root of society's ailments. It is the believing leaders of religion that keep the "denial circus" going decade after decade. We have, for too long, supported this tyranny of delusion. We have given the guru and the preacher the stage one too many times. It is time to wake up and replace the preacher with the human teacher—a human who is the intelligence of their whole organism."
Author: Christopher Loren

12. "Those who have little interest in spirituality shouldn't think that human inner values don't apply to you. The inner peace of an alert and calm mind are the source of real happiness and good health. Our human intelligence tells us which of our emotions are positive and helpful and which are damaging and to be restrained or avoided. - 12/7/2012 on his Facebook page"
Author: Dalai Lama XIV

13. "This is systems security for the Central Intelligence Agency. We would like to know why you are attempting to hack one of our classified databases."
Author: Dan Brown

14. "To lack intelligence is to be in the ring blindfolded."
Author: David M. Shoup

15. "When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

16. "As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies."
Author: Gary Wolf

17. "In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential."
Author: Gijs De Vries

18. "Pourquoi souffrons-nous ainsi ? demande le vieux poète Norbert de Varenne à Georges Duroy. C'est que nous étions nés sans doute pour vivre d'avantage selon la matière et moins selon l'esprit ; mais, à force de penser, une disproportion s'est faite entre l'état de notre intelligence agrandie et les conditions immuables de notre vie."
Author: Guy De Maupassant

19. "For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who "believe and tremble" has one."
Author: Herman Melville

20. "When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied."
Author: Herophilus

21. "The US Intelligence Community: ark and flood in one package."
Author: John Alejandro King

22. "As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists."
Author: John Ralston Saul

23. "When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
Author: John Steinbeck

24. "Every person of intelligence should be able to use his mother tongue correctly. It only requires a little pains, a little care, a little study to enable one to do so, and the recompense is great.Consider the contrast between the well-bred, polite man who knows how to choose and use his words correctly and the underbred, vulgar boor, whose language grates upon the ear and jars the sensitiveness of the finer feelings. The blunders of the latter, his infringement of all the canons of grammar, his absurdities and monstrosities of language , make his very presence a pain, and one is glad to escape from his company.The proper grammatical formation of the English language , so that one may acquit himself as a correct conversationalist in the best society or be able to write and express his thoughts and ideas upon paper in the right manner, may be acquired in a few lessons."
Author: Joseph Devlin

25. "Scorch: "I think Sev might have an anger problem." Sev: "I think you have an intelligence problem."
Author: Karen Traviss

26. "The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure."
Author: Laurence J. Peter

27. "When one's mind dwells on the objects of Senses, fondness for them grows on him, from fondness comes desire, from desire anger. Anger leads to bewilderment, bewilderment to loss of memory of true Self, and by that intelligence is destroyed, and with the destruction of intelligence he perishes."
Author: Lord Krishna

28. "So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine."
Author: Maureen Dowd

29. "It is not government's job to mandate responsibility on our behalf. We have the intelligence and good sense to make wise consumption choices for ourselves and our children. It is up to us to do what is best for our health and our children's health."
Author: Michael Crapo

30. "Nerd. Geek. Used to be if you self-identified that way, you'd get thrown into a locker and never have sex. Or worse, whatever that is. But to me and more and more people I know, being a nerd or a geek means having passion, power, intelligence. Being a nerd just means there is something in the world that you care deeply about—be it twelve-sided dice, a favorite sports team, your new laptop or Night Rider."
Author: Olivia Munn

31. "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties."
Author: Paul Goodman

32. "If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student."
Author: Paul Graham

33. "This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."
Author: Peter Watts

34. "If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

35. "I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents."
Author: Ray Kurzweil

36. "In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? ("Mad House")"
Author: Richard Matheson

37. "There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence."
Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

38. "The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use."
Author: Robert Greene

39. "Il faut savoir allier le pessimisme de l´intelligence à l´optimisme de la volonté."
Author: Romain Rolland

40. "Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones."
Author: Ruth Hurmence Green

41. "It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community."
Author: Seymour Hersh

42. "She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence."
Author: Sri Aurobindo

43. "…It's not that you don't have the capacity to accept the truth. You don't want to accept it, and you hide behind your own logic and intelligence while the truth marches by. Step out and join it, for goodness'' sake! Shout it out in full step! I believe!"
Author: Ted Dekker

44. "The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review."
Author: Terence McKenna

45. "I had made the fatal mistake of believing in his touch, as if the intelligence of his hands, our orgasms, the way he penetrated me, had affected him as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this is the catch cry of the egoist: I love, therefore I must be loved. Perhaps it is the Achilles' heel of my gender."
Author: Tobsha Learner

46. "I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill, and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one's environment and the natural inclination to close one's eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: 'What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.' You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés."
Author: Victor Serge

47. "[Seeing clearly] is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one's environment and the natural inclination to close one's eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: 'What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.' You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable cliches."
Author: Victor Serge

48. "The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence."
Author: Walter Lippmann

49. "If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations of haphazard nebulae, if life is a colloidal accident, impersonally permanent and individually fleeting, if man is only a compound of chemicals, destined to disintegrate and utterly disappear, if the creative ecstasy of art, and the gentle wisdom of the sage, and the willing martyrdom of saints are but bright incidents in the protoplasmic pullulation of the earth, and death is the answer to every problem and the destiny of every soul--then philosophy will face that too, and try to find within that narrowed circle some significance and nobility for man."
Author: Will Durant

50. "A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious (...) or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us."
Author: Will Wiles

Intelligence Quotes Pictures