“Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.”
“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. ”
“Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him”
“It is a question of cubic capacity, said he; a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”
“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.”
“To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person s intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)”
“I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don t need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven t gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.”
“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
“It s important to be smart, but it s also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.”
“Parrots mimic their owners. Their owners consider that a sign of intelligence.”
“Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don t say she will but she can.”
“My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.”
“Share your love, share you happiness, care for others; your wealth will be endless.”
“The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one s spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.”
“I ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.”
“Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.”
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not know how it produces the universe just as we do not know how we construct our brains.”