Alan Kay Quotes

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

I never thought that I was very intelligent.

The difference between intelligence and an education is this: that intelligence will make a good living for you, but education won't do much for you at all.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

I had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.

Are kids smarter than adults? All evidence points to that being true.

I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.

I consider myself a reasonably intelligent guy. Made straight A's in high school (except for driver's ed and typing).

I need something, Wax. A place to look. You always did the thinking.” “Yes, having a brain helps with that, surprisingly.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

I've never had a dumb quarterback. I think if you're dumb, it's difficult to overcome.

The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

Get smart and nothing can touch you.

From now on you're going to have to think. There's a reason why we're born with brains in our heads, not rocks.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems

Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definitions.

Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.