Ray Kurzweil Quotes

I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom.

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has an indespensible quote: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once and still retain the ability to function'. Or, as I like to call it, 'O.J. killed his wife, and the police are corrupt.'

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

You can't be taught to be brainy. You've either got it or you don't.

Intelligence is not easy to come by.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

[Smart] is an elusive concept. There's a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

It's all very simple, or else it's all very complex, or perhaps it's neither, or both.

Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.

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

It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

These little grey cells. It is up to them.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Good wits will jump.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.