Intelligence Quotations

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

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.

Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

The people who work in intelligence work are more conscious, more apt to be attentive.

Public officials insult our intelligence and our goodwill when they paint rosy pictures about budgets, jobs, bipartisanship, and transparency, and alter their positions on issues simply to keep collecting their paycheck by never disagreeing or disappointing anyone.

I'm very interested in soldier recovery projects and in Bradley Manning's story, the army intelligence officer who's being held as a detainee and is going to trial for crimes of treason.

Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.

I think America has more than enough maturity and intelligence to start exercising its world leadership responsibly.

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

I can remember when I was National Security Adviser, the intelligence community told us... they put out an intelligence report saying that Iran would never back off from attacks on shipping in the Gulf if we use force.

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.

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

The iPhone is made on a global scale, and it blends computers, the Internet, communications, and artificial intelligence in one blockbuster, game-changing innovation. It reflects so many of the things that our contemporary world is good at - indeed, great at.

The Bush administration also was not straightforward about the intelligence it had, releasing tenuous information that fit its goal of attacking Iraq. I feel deceived.

No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.

First, I have the privilege of being Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is not an oxymoron I assure you.

We should all feel confident in our intelligence. By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to change it.

I rise today to discuss the National Intelligence Reform bill. I commend my colleagues in both Houses for their hard work in coming to an agreement. As with any conference, each voice is heard, but none can dominate and compromise must be achieved.

Fluid intelligence is not a Big Five personality trait: It's a measurement of one's ability to rapidly learn and apply a rule set. As an entrepreneur, you're rapidly dealing with different issues, and your ability to switch from one issue to another is very important.

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.

I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

No one holds a permanent speed advantage in the market due to the limits of human intelligence and vision. Your advantage comes from your ability to feel the change faster and take decisive action faster.

Openness explains the ability to innovate and come up with big ideas because you're open to them, and fluid intelligence explains the ability to go and execute.

I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people.

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.

I think probably the qualities that I look for in a man are somewhat different than they were before I became a public person, but not that much different. I think that, sort of, the element of trust is certainly much bigger for me, but the other things that - the other qualities, intelligence and kindness and sense of humor, those things.

The Germans certainly - the intelligence service believed that there were WMD. It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.

I was reading about all of these medical and psychological experimental programs that the government and various intelligence agencies had run throughout the 20th century. Any book you can read on that, there's some really horrifying and fascinating stuff that goes on there.

Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

The problem with holistic management is it's so profoundly simple, but it's not easy. And it's profoundly simple. You're almost insulting people's intelligence to explain it twice, just about making better decisions of where you want to go in your life, bringing in environmental, social, economic issues simultaneously.

I am not opposed to intelligence reform on its face, but any changes should reflect the current context.

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

Let's just be smart this time. I'm looking for smart.

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence. Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.

God does not require you to follow His leadings on blind trust. Behold the evidence of an invisible intelligence pervading everything, even your own mind and body.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

Others can challenge and motivate us, but we must reach down deep into our souls and call forth our God-given intelligence and capabilities. We cannot do this when we depend on the efforts of someone else.

To become a singer requires work, work, and again, work! It need not be in any special corner of the earth; there is no one spot that will do more for you than other places. It doesn't matter so much where you are if you have intelligence and a good ear.

By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.

In order to be successful against each of these threats, we have to have a presence overseas, work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community, but also with the intelligence community.

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.

The intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind.

And I understand that, I testified in closed hearings over eight years because there are intelligence matters, there are sensitive matters that should not be held in a public hearing.

In other cases, when the medium becomes entranced, the demonstration of a communicator's separate intelligence may become stronger and the sophistication less.

Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years in advance of us. We're the galaxy's noodling newbies.

Daniel Goleman has proven that two-thirds of the success in business is based upon our Emotional Intelligence as opposed to our IQ or our level of experience. As we look for the next crop of future CEOs, maybe it's time for America's corporations to start interviewing grads from the psychology master's programs rather than the M.B.A. programs.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.

I am committed to ensure that our intelligence community, law enforcement, medical professionals, and military have the information and funding needed to protect the American people from threats at home and abroad.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

I believe that what is really important is that God can speak to us. If we have the humility to approach him in prayer with the right attitude, he can speak to our intelligence directly.

Another factor is the decision, made in 1976, to sharply divide the FBI and the foreign intelligence agencies. The FBI would collect within the United States; the foreign intelligence agencies would collect overseas.

The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts.

In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.

They have involved co-operation between the Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda operatives on training and combined operations regarding bomb making and chemical and biological weapons.

There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Could it be that all those reports coming from our own intelligence that Bush ignored was right all along? Could it be that the UN was right all along?

Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available again Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

I mean enormous pressure was brought to bear - Valerie Amos, Lady Amos, went round Africa with people from our intelligence services trying to press them. I had to make sure that we didn't promise a misuse of aid in a way that would be illegal.

Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.

It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

We have no regulation of drones in the United States in their commercial use. You can see drones some day hovering over the homes of Hollywood luminaries, violating privacy. This question has to be addressed. And we need rules of operation on the border, by police, by commercial use, and also by military and intelligence use.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.

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

The prompt assimilation of that intelligence will be essential if we are to avoid another September 11th.