“The measure of brilliance is in its utility.”
“Direct engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn t happen that much on the technical side of intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.”
“Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.”
“There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.”
“Bax had learned there weren’t many things a dumb guy liked more than to have someone tell him how smart he was.”
“Honor your inner voices”
“Listen to the fool s reproach! It is a kingly title!”
“As if their not being smart were not unfortunate enough, most people think they are smart.”
“Debate, just not to show your intelligence, but to find out a better solution.”
“There are many ways of being witty and intelligent - almost as many as of not being, They are often the same. Like free electrons on the planet of the apes, with a time window on to a parallel universe. The only solution to the mechanization of man is Ie devenir-machine: becoming-machine. Warhol had seen this. He was the apotheosis of the machinic: total automatism, all trace of the human gone. The dream of the virtual era, by contrast, is to wrest the machine from machinicity, to make it intelligent and soulful, interactive , to turn it into an associate anthropoid with the same affective and intellectual, sexual and reproductive functions - and, lastly, the same viruses and melancholia.”
“If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you re perceived as intelligent. I m a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you re told it is.”
“Seeing that our birth involves the blending of these two things—the body, on the one hand, that we share with animals, and, on the other hand, rationality and intelligence, that we share with the gods—most of us incline to this former relationship, wretched and dead though it is, while only a few to the one that is divine and blessed.”
“I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.”
“hacking was a fundamental, though mostly secret, tool of American statecraft, one deployed clandestinely against foe and friend alike”
“The problem with imagining you are smarter than everyone else is you always discover you were wrong.”
“After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence - that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.”
“..perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as int a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.”