Lance Henriksen Quotes

I'm a natural puzzle solver.

Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.

I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.

To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What's more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you'll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh.

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.

Don’t think that intelligence stops with allies.

Spies are great, and when you need 'em, you need 'em. But they are no substitute for insight.

The way you have to think in chess is good for everyday thinking, really, especially for brothers in the urban community who never take that second look, never take that second thought.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.

Women play a finesse game: a real pattern game as opposed to flash and dash, power and strength.

I always know how to play this game. It's about being smart.

I don't make many mental mistakes. Yeah, I'm smarter than I look.

Most business problems, you will have an intuitive idea on what to do.

In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless; others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.

Why, then, do you think the white player might have done it?" Reynie considered. He imagined himself moving out his knight only to bring it right back to where it started. Why would he ever do such a thing? At last he said,"Perhaps because he doubted himself.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots.

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.

The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.