Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

- Havel, Vaclav

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

Chomsky, Noam

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Pound, Ezra

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

Thoreau, Henry David

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.

Lewis, Wyndham

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Marx, Karl

I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.

Bankhead, Tallulah

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Bronowski, Jacob

10.

People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.

Randi, James

11.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

Thomas, Dylan

12.

The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

13.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Orwell, George

14.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.

Lec, Stanislaw J.

16.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

17.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Havel, Vaclav

18.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Wilson, Robert

19.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

20.

If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

21.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

22.

You think you are clever until you find out how smart you are

23.

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

Foucault, Michel

24.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, But quickly to see how to make them good.

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

Ask a wise man to dinner and he'll upset everyone by his gloomy silence or tiresome questions. Invite him to a dance and you'll have a camel prancing about. Haul him off to a public entertainment and his face will be enough to spoil the people's entertainment.

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Russell, Bertrand

30.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

31.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

32.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

33.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Colby, Frank Moore

34.

Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.

Fatmi, Haneef

35.

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew.

Goldsmith, Oliver

37.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

Proust, Marcel

38.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

Cavett, Dick

39.

Intelligence: I was asked tonight why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won t. 1. I am not an intellectual. Two minutes talk with Aldous Huxley,William Glock,or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat,drink,smoke,and relax. 4. I don't know very much,but what I do know I know better than anybody,and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress,and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Agate, James

40.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

Anderson, Gillian

41.

Half of being smart is knowing what you are dumb about.

Short, Solomon

42.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Sontag, Susan

43.

I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.

Allen, Woody

44.

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

45.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Fromm, Erich

46.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

Pound, Ezra

48.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

49.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.