Intellectual Competition Quotes

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.

The days when it was possible to win a serious game only by merit of sporting character or depth of chess understanding have vanished forever. Chess knowledge has become dominant, bypassing all the other factors that contribute to success.

I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.

Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

The greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

I had no new ideas on the physics we might learn, and I could not compete with the younger generation.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

I'd love it if I could face off against the 'Eggheads.'

A scientist's life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete, but they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith "in the validity of Maxwell's or Boltzmann's equations," and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.

There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.

My one aim and concentrated purpose shall be and is to show that women can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature and science . . .

What I believe is important is that we win the battle of ideas.

We learn not for life but for the debating-room.

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

I went to a school where everyone was smarter than me. And I'm not blowin' smoke, I, my, I was surrounded by genius, genius kids. What's interesting about growing up in a culture like that is you go, "All right, I gotta figure out what my thing is. Because I'm not smarter than these kids. I'm not funnier than half of them, so I better figure out what it is I wanna do and work really hard at that because intellectually I'm treading water to, to be here."

I have to know more than everyone else in the room. In a roomful of men, I have to know more than them.