intelligent quotes

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk.

- AlbenWilliam Barkley
Recalled on his death, 30  Apr1956.

You probably know, the better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligentenoughto comehomeagain.Thenthey'retoo old and intelligent to want to.

- Malcolm Stanley Bradbury
  Rates of Exchange, pt.5, ch.3.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movementbut it passes away from them.They are not the leaders of a revolution. Theyare its victims.

- Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
Under Western Eyes, pt.2, ch.3.

The first rule of intelligenttinkering istosavealltheparts.

- Paul Ralph Ehrlich
In the Saturday Review, 5  Jun.

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag It's so elegant So intelligent.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  The Waste Land, pt.2,'A Game of Chess'.

The clever men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent MrToad.

- Kenneth Grahame
  The Wind in the Willows, ch.10.

Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

- Aldous Leonard Huxley
  Texts and Pretexts,'Amor Fati'.

Preparing for suicide is not a very intelligent means of defence.

- Bruce Kent
  Speech.

There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from whichmenrarelyescape.This disease varies indegree in different men† I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind†more clever and more learned than it is† I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person† They†express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing† If met with applause†so does the disease itself become aggravated.

-Maimonides properly Moses ben Maimon
Aphorisms. Quoted in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.3, p.555 (1935).

I thought of my mother, who would publicly campaign for birth control but would never even think she needed to talk to me, so firmly was she convinced that sex was something no womanno intelligent womanwould ever submit to unless she had to.

- Alice ne  e Laidlaw Munro
Lives of Girls and Women,'Baptizing'.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

- George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
  'The Prevention of Literature', in Polemic,  Jan.

A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de diffe  rence entre les hommes. The more intelligent one is, the greater the differences onefindsamong men.Ordinary persons donot perceive differences among men.

- Blaise Pascal
c.1654^1662  Pense  es, pt.1, no.7.

Thething isit'sreally hard tobe room-mateswith people if your suitcases are much better than theirsif yours are really good and theirs aren't.You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humour, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.

-J(erome) D(avid) Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, ch.15.