Bergen Evans Quotes

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

Having a larger vocabulary the day you walk into kindergarten is advantageous.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

I tested in the top percentile for IQ, but I couldn't tie my shoes or really ride a bike without training wheels until I was almost 7.

All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.

My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

Intelligence may be taken as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of moral advance. All morally advanced children are bright, but not all bright children are morally advanced.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts

It is the nature of intellect to strive to improve in intellectual power.

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father.

Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth."

I have an IQ of about 160, I taught science for about fifteen years.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.