Quotes about Intelligence

“It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.”

“As a former career intelligence professional, I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.”

“The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.”

“In reality, serial killers are of average intelligence.”

“Artificial intelligence is destroying the traditional world of work.”

“Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.”

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

“A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”

“I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.”

“Remember to be as smart as you are.”

“In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.”

“To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.”

“The Chilcot report is damning. It exposes a litany of failures over a long period, including reliance on flawed intelligence assessments, lack of planning and insufficient foresight of obvious consequences. But the report also exposes a chilling lack of rigour and a political culture of deference.”

“All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.”

“This idea that clumsy, stumbling people are real bright is ridiculous, because intelligence is related to neurologic function, and really intelligent people are very well-coordinated.”

“I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.”

“You'll remember Dr. Rice said that several times: It was not a warning about the place and the method and the time - it was a general warning. And that points out the imperfection, if you would, of our intelligence.”

“But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.”

“Iron sharpens iron; scholar, the scholar.”

“I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.”

“When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.”