Intelligence

"If you want to foresee the behavior of someone, their personality is a better predictor than their intelligence."

"Creativity is a high level of thinking and intelligence."

"... I say to you, without pleasure, that this son of ours will be a great man, because -- well -- because he is not very intelligent. He can see only one desire at a time. I said he tested his dreams; he will murder every dream with the implacable arrows of his will. This boy will win to every goal of his aiming; for he can realize no thought, no reason, but his own. And I am sorry for his coming greatness..."

"If we were to plot the distance between where you are RIGHT NOW and the nearest good idea, it would describe a line too big to fit inside the universe."

"Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of that saving dullness of intelligence which sees little difference between A and B. To him it must be either A or B. And if it is to be A, its shape, degree, and shade of color must precisely match his own conception of it; otherwise he will not accept it. Your brother, being sensitive, is all his life walking on a line he has chosen—a line as precarious as a tight rope. At the same time he impatiently demands that others also tread an equally precarious rope, without missing their footing. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this stems from selfishness. Imagine a world which could react exactly the way your brother expects; that world would undoubtedly be far more advanced than the world as it is now. Consequently, he detests the world which is—aesthetically, intellectually, and ethically—not as advanced as he is himself. That's why it's different from mere selfishness, I think."

"what if you've been born more intelligent than others? and you can't force them to understand you, but you can understand them?. then you just need to force yourself on them, and you can map out their axioms and core beliefs and try to transform them. and then map out the fundamental concepts they need to know to understand you. i wish you understood me."

"They are as smart as they are ruthless. That's why they've been around for all five years."

"To be wise means to know when to stay silent."

"Without understanding, there is no life. Either you act, out of understanding or act to develop understanding out of it."

"The most intelligent or brilliant of us all are not usually the most successful, financially or career wise. A lot depends on the ability of a person to break into circles, meet people, network and interact. A well marketed yam may sell better than a not-so-well marketed Jollof. Do not just stay in the library and read all the books there, lest you become publicly dusty like the books you read. Food for thought!"

"Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed."

"Creativity is about connecting things. The key to genius is knowing how to make those connections."

"Sight is seeing what's there, vision is seeing what's possible"

"Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect."

"I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true."

"I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it."

"Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes."

"a typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about five billion pairs of nucleotides… But since there are four different kinds of nucleotides, the number of bits of information in DNA is four times the number of nucleotide pairs. Thus if a single chromosome has five billion (5 X 10^9) nucleotides, it contains twenty billion (2 X 10^10) bits of information… We also see that if more than some tens of billions (several times 10^10) of bits of information are necessary for human survival, extragenetic systems will have to provide them: the rate of development of genetic systems is so slow that no source of such additional biological information can be sought in the DNA."

"Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today."

"The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely relatedspecies-say, lions and tigers-do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt andcontrol, or we perish."