“We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.”
“Modern intelligence won t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.”
“Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself”
“To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, so that he would see whether I knew myself or not. The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher. He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.”
“Intelligence without wisdom is a like a car without a steering wheel. You can drive it as long as you don’t consider steering part of driving.”
“There can be no question that parrots have more intellect than any other kind of bird, and it is this that makes them such favourite pets and brings upon them so many sorrows. ...Men will buy them ... and carry them off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt not, to treat them kindly; but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel , and confinement in a solitary cell, the discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the superadded horrors of ... life in a tin case, hung from a nail in the wall of a dark shop... Why does the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into the woes of parrots? ... However happy you make her captivity, imagination will carry her at times to the green field and blue sky, and she fancies herself somewhere near the sun, heading a long file of exultant companions in swift career through the whistling air. Then she opens her mouth and rings out a wild salute to all parrots in the far world below her.”
“A person that has more intelligence than education always makes his own grade!”
“Great minds with great ideas usually share in the midst of their persecution”
“An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.”
“Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed. It s memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that s what thingummy said. Who? You know, what s his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what was he called? Begins with an H . Homer? No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it s gone. Anyway. Memory, that s the key.”
“At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright s.”
“Tα κομπιούτερ περιέχουν τόσο νοημοσύνη, όσο τα στερεοφωνικά συγκροτήματα περιέχουν μουσικά όργανα.”
“Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.”
“A critical attitude, like activity, is one of the fundamental characteristics of our time. Both are interdependent. If the critical attitude should dwindle, there would be more peace and less intelligence, to the benefit of the essential. Neither criticism nor activity, however, can steer the course in such a direction - this means that higher forces are involved.”
“L Homme a arrêté son évolution après avoir inventé la roue et l air climatisé.”
“Les enfants sont des créatures extraordinaires, quand ils ne sont pas simplement chiants.”
“One of the problems with having time to read all that you want is that your interests become so eclectic it s hard to focus.”