Joseph Henry Quotes

The number of people that can reason well is much smaller than those that can reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling rocks, then several reasoners might be better than one. But reasoning isn't like hauling rocks, it's like, it's like racing, where a single, galloping Barbary steed easily outruns a hundred wagon-pulling horses.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

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.

Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.

The advance of science spares us from irrational dread.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

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

Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it's not simply, 'Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is?' That's an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information that's presented in front of you.

Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth, and that service is indeed communal. It cannot be rigidly planned. Rather, it requires freedom and courage and the plural contributions of many different kinds of people who must maintain their individuality while giving to the group.

Openness explains the ability to innovate and come up with big ideas because you're open to them, and fluid intelligence explains the ability to go and execute.

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Every problem can be solved as long as they use common sense and apply the right research and techniques.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

My opponent has all the intellectual rigor of an amoeba.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

I don’t think we can pass a law that fixes stupid.

It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.

I like to think of myself as fairly intellectual.