#o

I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe . . . Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy. ↗

— Daniel Webster

#government #design

Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#thomas-raith #vanity #humor

1.If you can bring your consciousness, your awareness, your intelligence to the act, if you can be spontaneous, then there is no need for any other religion, life itself will be the religion. ↗

— Osho

#inspirational

Our greatest natural resources are our hearts and minds, together with those of the people around us. ↗

— Diane Dreher

#inspirational

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. ↗

— Jane Austen

#clichés #concealment #empowerment #feminism #ignorance

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#children #curiosity #knowledge #intelligence

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools. ↗

— Marguerite Yourcenar

#knowledge #self #intelligence

I know it doesn't feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what - or ideally whom - to lust after. We choose what to watch, what to like, what to build, how to spend the breaths that we've been alive. And the fact that many of our choices are unconscious - get that handbag, get that Starbucks, look at that Snooki - does not in any way make us less responsible for those choices. I'm happiest when I feel like I'm part of a community that helps me choose more intelligently and with greater empathy. And I, for one, like the choices we made this weekend. ↗

— John Green

#intelligence

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity. ↗

— Aaron Swartz

#curiosity #reading #intelligence

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#knowledge #radio #tv #intelligence