Martin Gardner Quotes

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

Kids aren't dumb - they might not get something, but they're going to figure it out.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.

From now on you're going to have to think. There's a reason why we're born with brains in our heads, not rocks.

Two key ingredients in any successful chef: a quick learner and someone with a sharp brain.

They gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.

We have our own brains.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

Do you have a brain? Then you can think your way out of it. The reason we have brains is so we can figure out how to do things.

It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one's body is a mental activity.

The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.

It is impossible to live without brains, either one's own or borrowed.

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

You should employ your little grey cells.

The thing that is probably most important is having a brain, and to be able to figure things out and learn things very rapidly.

There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.

If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and over their burrows, as seems the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they act in nearly the same manner as would man under similar circumstances.

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.