Intellectual Challenges Quotes

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

They think we are retarded. They are retarded.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

Life is a battle of wits, and many people have to fight it unarmed.

I loved doing problems in school.

No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.

The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges.

Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life

In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.

Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators.

As long as a branch of science offers an abundance of problems, so long it is alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction or the cessation of independent development.

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

It's the refuge for the mentally deficient. It's made by dull people for dull people.

There is no one "root of all evil" in software development. Design is hard in many ways. People tend to underestimate the intellectual and practical difficulties involved in building a significant system involving software. It is not and will not be reduced to a simple mechanical "assembly line" process. Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Problems are challenges to creative minds. Without problems, there would be little reason to think at all.

But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.

Too stupid to learn and too stupid to give up.

Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table.

I'm not like that smart. I like, forget stuff all the time.