intellectual comparison Quotes

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

No man is smart, except by comparison to those who know less

I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am-most of them theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper thinkers than I am, I have broader interests than they have.

I'm confident that I'm as intelligent as many people, but I know that I'm not as intelligent as some. So in the presence of hyperintelligent people, I'm a shrinking violet because I don't want to look like a fool. I know a little about a lot and a lot about a little.

That strange premature genius Chatterton has couched in one line the quintessence of what Voltaire has said in many pages: "Reason, a thorn in Revelation's side.

Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They're less intellectual than men.

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

When I was finishing my PhD, I could just see people who were a bit quicker and brighter and smarter than me and I thought, 'well they are the people who are going to make the great discoveries.'

Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

I'm not like a high intellectual. That's the thing.

The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.

I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

Jonathan Edwards is without a doubt the most brilliant mind America ever produced. I'm not talking about theologian; I'm talking about mind and everybody. I put him above Einstein and everybody else.

I’ve heard 14 year old meth addicted thai prostitutes say more prescient things than the woman that was supposedly a “professor

I have always wanted to be a man, if only for the reason that I would like to have gauged the value of my intellect.

All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo.

I'm not Gore Vidal or William Buckley.

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming; but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinction of sex.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or eventhe Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.