Cognitive Disparity Quotes

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

If we ever established contact with intelligent life on another world, there would be barriers to communication. First, they would be many light years away, so signals would take many years to reach them: there would be no scope for quick repartee. There might be an IQ gap.

The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid.

A lot of times when you're around really, really smart people, you don't really understand them.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

It will never be possible to eliminate the fact that human beings have different levels of knowledge and consciousness

Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in the light of the best explanations we have of how such disagreement arises.

When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.

There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.

I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.

The gap between first-class and international is mostly on the mental aspect.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

I found reading Alan Bennett striking because you have this sudden flash of recognition when you read about a boy who has intellectual interests utterly different from his parents.