“Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.”
“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I ve never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.”
“The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.”
“The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.”
“A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.”
“Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.”
“Wisdom is nothing more than confirmed imagination: just because one did not study for his exam does not mean that he should leave it blank.”
“A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”
“I happen to feel that the degree of a person s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.”
“Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.”
“Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.”
“The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.”
“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”
“Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”
“Mobs have passions, not brains.”
“We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.”
“The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray s good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”