Neal Stephenson Quotes

Don't be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

Your audience is a lot smarter than you realize.

Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

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

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.

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

Many much-learned men have no intelligence.

He that has more Knowledge than Judgment, is made for another Man's use more than his own.

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.

There is a difference between people who are educated and people who are smart.

Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.

You mustn't underestimate an audience's intelligence.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Better than the strength of men and horses is our wisdom.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.