James Ransone Quotes

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

People don't understand complex issues.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for making a summary.

By discovering how our minds work, we can improve our learning power and unlock our true potential.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

Intelligence is set by policy.

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

Even today, I am easily distracted by reading material and will pick up articles on virtually any factual material if I have the time.

I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.

I still believe that education is about provoking some kind of original, creative thought.

The truth is, the less a subject had to do with the visible world, the more talented I was at solving problems.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

I've learned to use big words. Because I'm an avid reader, I can prove myself as a smart and diligent person.

Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself.