#sm

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind. ↗

— Andrea Dworkin

#genius #intelligence #sexism #women #intelligence

Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#foreign-policy #geopolitics #ignorance #populism #intelligence

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality. ↗

— Adam Gopnik

#humans #ingenuity #intelligence #mortality #smarts

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul! ↗

— Chaim Potok

#compassion #hasidic-judaism #intelligence #judaism #parenting

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us. ↗

— P.D. James

#intelligent-life #pessimism #intelligence

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#pessimism #philosophy #rhetoric #intelligence

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#feeling #intelligence #smarts #intelligence

An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems. ↗

— Tahir Shah

#afghanistan #folklore #proverbs #saying #sufis

An egoist is always intelligent, never wise. ↗

— Raheel Farooq

#egoism #intelligence #wisdom #intelligence

Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid. ↗

— Hedy Lamarr

#hedy-lamarr #intelligence #woman #intelligence