Gretchen Rubin Quotes

People are not stupid.

Your audience is a lot smarter than you realize.

People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

People are smarter than you might think.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

I hate to be smart.

Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual....It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was the clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was 'intelligence' after all, but the ability to read into things?

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

If smart people are parodying it, that's a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

Intelligence is a critical thing.

People love solving puzzles, and you always love it when somebody smarter than you is solving puzzles.

As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

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

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.

I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

intelligence is always intimidating to those who aren't!

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.