Intelligence

"Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who 'pretend,' which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it."

"Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory."

"The mysterious Enoch Root meets 8-year-old Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 1713: "Do I look like a schoolmaster to you" "No, but you talk like one." "You know something of schoolmasters, do you"Yes, sir," the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg. "Yet here it is the middle of Monday—" "The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and—" "And what" "Get more ahead of the others than I was already." "If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school."

"In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind."

"Genius has now all-but disappeared from public view; partly because intelligence (which is strongly genetic) is in decline in the West, partly because social institutions no longer recognize or nurture genius, and partly because the modern West is actively hostile to genius."

"You have to be brave when you are stupid."

"Most of the people could be good at something specific, but they probably never discover what it is."

"To be a good at something you have to be intelligent like an elephant, sly like a fox and patient like a camel."

"The best minds have their soft spots and sometimes feel somewhat bruised by the scant respect of logic."

"The moment you establish a line of communication between two points, you subtly change both. That is also true for the way the brain is affected by the mind."

"Behave like men, and not like witless sheep..."

"Fine words have the power to make even the stupidest person sound intelligent."

"When people's faith in the collective intelligence increases, falls to the same extent their own individual sense of responsibility."

"I see the impossible work being done by of my friends at the federal agencies, the Pentagon, NATO, Five Eyes and the intelligence community. They are doing the impossible, for the ungrateful and with a fraction of the budgets required to render a viable defense."

"In this world where value is unknown, but the price of anything is marked, where the creation of self has been abandoned for the search for self, the behavior diagnosed as antisocial is often too quickly ascribed to intelligence when thrust into contact with widespread conformity, and refuses."

"You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary Mc Leod Bethune, and my mother - yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss."

"Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix."

"The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment."

"The declining of responsibility for the self can also be hidden behind a pseudo-objectivity. A patient may make astute observations about himself and give a fairly accurate report of what he dislikes in himself. On the surface it seems as though he is perceptive and honest about himself. But "he" may be merely the intelligent observer of a fellow who is inhibited, fearful, or arrogantly demanding. Hence, since he is not responsible for the fellow he observes, the hurt to his pride is cushioned—all the moreso because the flashlight of his pride is focused on his faculty for keen observations."

"We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts."Really"We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources."And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can."