#p

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#stupidity #intelligence

When you're in the back of the pack, you can gamble a little bit more. ↗

— Michael Andretti

#bit #gamble #little #little bit #more

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #belief #fantasy #god #humility

Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#intelligence #inventive #intelligence

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#skepticism #intelligence

I am not a certified idiot—" "Lack of certification hardly proves intelligence," Will muttered. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#gabriel-lightwood #will-herondale #intelligence

People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#philosophy #sci-fi #intelligence

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. ↗

— Max Planck

#intelligence

Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#intelligence

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise. ↗

— Blaise Pascal

#hell #intelligence #paradise #stupidity #intelligence