Quotes on Intelligence

American stuntmen are smart - they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance... But in Hong Kong, we don't know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you've got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone. They worry about, 'Do I have enough? Don't I have enough?'

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it's really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It's about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.

The truth is that intelligence, knowledge, and domain expertise are vastly overrated as the driving forces behind competitive advantage and sustainable success.

To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

The mind always functions in an eccentric way, the mind is always an idiot. The really intelligent person has no mind. Intelligence arises out of no-mind, idiocy out of the mind. Mind is idiotic, no-mind is wise. No-mind is wisdom, intelligence. Mind depends on knowledge, on methods, on money, on experience, on this and that. Mind always needs props, it needs supports, it cannot exist on its own. On its own, it flops.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge.

It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong.