Social Intelligence Quotes & Sayings

But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality - a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature. — Norman McLaren

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) — Nick Land

Dragons, like four o'clock tea, crumpets, marmalade, and zip-up cardigans, are a peculiarity to the Ununited Kingdoms. They are fierce, fire-breathing creatures of great intelligence, dignity, and sensitivity who could and did converse on matters of great importance. But for all their intelligence, wit, and social graces, dragons still had one habit that made them impossible to ignore." "And that is?" "They liked to eat people. — Jasper Fforde

Social intelligence is a function of culture. In other words, the behaviours and characteristics one culture considers socially intelligent are not necessarily deemed socially intelligent by another. (Dong, Koper & Collaco 2008, 165). Social intelligence is something that we learn — Anonymous

I am a passionate seeker after Truth and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions used
by the "Party of Order", the official representatives of all turpitudes, religious, metaphysical,
political, judicial, economic, and social, present and past, to brutalise and enslave the world; I am a
fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the only medium in which can develop intelligence,
dignity, and the happiness of man; — Mikhail Bakunin

I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer," Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone's breakfast. He added: "In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room. — Terry Pratchett

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. — Virginia Woolf

Strategic planning for the future is the most hopeful indication of our increasing social intelligence. — William H. Hastie

The Kony campaign us an example of how powerful 'slacktivisim' can be, and demonstrates that, with enough worldwide awareness and social pressure, movements like this one have the power to make politicians move. It also makes the ignorant less so. No-one knew who Kony was before the campaign. The atrocities were happening, and it wasn't even a blip on the social consciousness radar. It's encouraging that there's a way to spread information like this so quickly. — Charlie Caruso

The dissonance that I felt daily flew in the face of what Silicon Valley says about itself: that it is a meritocracy, that it values intelligence and creativity, that everyone has a fair shot if they just work hard enough. This was true only if you were technical, and even that may not always be enough: in the age of the social network, who you know and who your friends were was becoming increasingly important. — Katherine Losse

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. — Carl Sagan

common sense observations of human behavior support a similar dissociation in reasoning abilities which cuts in both directions. We all know persons who are exceedingly clever in their social navigation, who have an unerring sense of how to seek advantage for themselves and for their group, but who can be remarkably inept when trusted with a nonpersonal, nonsocial problem. The reverse condition is just as dramatic: We all know creative scientists and artists whose social sense is a disgrace, and who regularly harm themselves and others with their behavior. The absent-minded professor is the benign variety of the latter type. At work, in these different personality styles, are the presence or absence of what Howard Gardner has called "social intelligence," or the presence or absence of one or the other of his multiple intelligences such as the "mathematical. — Antonio R. Damasio

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done. — Jacques Barzun

Moralism and ignorance are responsible for the constant stereotyping of prostitutes by their lowest common denominator
the sick, strung-out addicts, couched on city stoops, who turn tricks for drug money ... The most successful prostitutes in history have been invisible. That invisibility was produced by their high intelligence, which gives them the power to perceive, and move freely but undetected in the social frame. The prostitute is a superb analyst, not only in evading the law but in initiating the unique constellation of convention and fantasy that produces a stranger's orgasm. She lives by her wits as much as her body. She is a psychologist, actor, and dancer, a performance artist of hyper-developed sexual imagination. — Camille Paglia

Our genetic endowments, coupled with many early environmental impacts, establish our childhood intelligence. An environment lacking a sufficient level of stimulation stifles our mental development. An environment with a sufficient level of stimulation enables our genetically different abilities to flower, and at the same time often sets into motion positive social and cultural pressures that reinforce our improvement. — Shlomo Breznitz

The Mismeasure of Man treats one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth. Fortunately - and I made my decision on purpose - this limited subject embodies the deepest (and most common) philosophical error, with the most fundamental and far-ranging social impact, for the entire troubling subject of nature and nurture, or the genetic contribution to human social organization. — Stephen Jay Gould

I enjoy taking part in footballing events that are for social causes because, in my view, inspiring children through sport is a way of keeping their bodies and minds healthy as well as helping nurture their intelligence and ability to relate with others. — Shakira

Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence. — Michael Polanyi

To overcome our biological limitations as individuals, we have co-evolved collective systems and capacities - cultural, social, economic, political, scientific, media, educational, public relations, etc. But the flaw in all that is that we have designed them primarily for comfort, profit, power, control, and entertainment rather than for collective intelligence, sanity, and wisdom. — Tom Atlee

Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter. Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls "human networks" - so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily. — Thomas L. Friedman

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior. — Graydon Carter

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress - probably had never even begun to see into himself — Philip Roth

Just to clear the air, let's note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance. — Darrell Huff

What are dogs thinking?" the grand conclusion was this: they're thinking about what we're thinking. The dog-human relationship was not one-sided. With their high degree of social and emotional intelligence, dogs reciprocated our feelings toward them. They truly are First Friend. — Gregory Berns

When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. — Marie-Antoine Careme

It is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board). — Jonathan Haidt

There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills. — John T. Cacioppo

In the past, Rentaro had been taught that humans possessed both high intelligence and virtue and were true social animals, that they were the beings closest to God. Then why did they kill each other like beasts? How could they destroy each other's hopes and dreams? Why in the world could they machinate such stupid things? Damn — Shiden Kanzaki

The intelligence of the universe is social. — Marcus Aurelius

Don't travel alone ... meet up with others who are traveling also on the path of change, you can learn from each other a lot and together carry more learning experiences (social learning and collective intelligence). -Nadia Gabriela Dresscher — Lambert Of Maastricht

Starling knew what the malicious Dr. Lecter would say, and it was true: she was afraid there was something tacky that Senator Martin saw in her, something cheap, something thief-like that Senator Martin reacted to. That Vanderbilt bitch.
Dr. Lecter would relish pointing out that class resentment, the buried anger that comes with mother's milk, was a factor too. Starling gave away nothing to any Martin in education, intelligence, drive, and certainly physical appearance, but still it was there and she knew it. — Thomas Harris

My thoughts are limitless. Social conditioning creates the limits. I like to overtake those and like to go where my thoughts take me. — Debasish Mridha

It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals [with the help of genetic engineering]. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans. — Stephen Hawking

Political and social justice requires, not the disintegration of a country and destruction or humiliation of a class which shows initiative, intelligence and drive, but equality of opportunity for all, genuine freedom for self-fulfilment, in which all men irrespective of caste or creed may share. — Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Gerontologists studying the aging process find increasing evidence that most of us will age with a fair degree of success. There's far less institutionalization and disability than one might have guessed. While the size of social networks shrink with age, the quality of the relationships improves. There are types of cognitive skills that improve in old age (these are related to social intelligence and to making good strategic use of facts, rather than merely remembering them easily). The average elderly individual thinks his or her health is above average, and takes pleasure from that. And most important, the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young. — Robert M. Sapolsky

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial. — Fernando Pessoa

Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavours leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them mentally inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Nothing dulls the mind and soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine. — Rudolf Rocker

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression. Within a few seconds, with just a glance, people have judged your social and economic level, your level of education, and even your level of success. Within minutes, they've also decided your levels of intelligence, trustworthiness, competence, friendliness and confidence. Although these evaluations happen in an instant, they can last for years: first impressions are often indelible. — Olivia Fox Cabane

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud - that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee - that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling - that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others — Ayn Rand

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man. — Albert Einstein

One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. — H.L. Mencken

Lasting harmony between the sexes cannot be achieved through social, psychological, or political reform alone...they are not sufficient in themselves because gender reconciliation entails an inherent spiritual dimension. Gender disharmony is vast and pervasive; its symptoms are manifest in myriad ways in virtually every culture across the globe. For authentic gender reconciliation, we aspire to a comprehensive approach that includes but also transcends traditional modes of social change, invoking a larger universal intelligence or grace. — William Keepin

My great-grandfather was a man of great vision, drive, and native intelligence, with some human flaws amplified by limited education, limited social range, and questionable influence from some of his advisers. — William Clay Ford Jr.

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children's intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. — Steven Pinker

By educating women to use all their brains, men will not only be just, but will also ensure the future of a new social order in which women will apply their intelligence and warm feelings to the problems of living. Men are fools to entrust the upbringing of their sons, whom they expect to grow up to love freedom, to women who have never known freedom themselves. — Eugenio Maria De Hostos

Just is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent an is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors. — Marcel Proust

The issue is not whether people are "good enough" for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom. — Paul Goodman

The problem with holistic management is it's so profoundly simple, but it's not easy. And it's profoundly simple. You're almost insulting people's intelligence to explain it twice, just about making better decisions of where you want to go in your life, bringing in environmental, social, economic issues simultaneously. — Allan Savory

In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practiced the ultimate democracy. You didn't need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people. — Terry Pratchett

Existentialism and psychoanalysis, without forgetting socialism, are mainly what killed basic intelligence in the West. When someone affirms that two plus two equals four, his pulse is taken, and he is asked what social milieu he comes from. Logic is replaced by relativistic psychology, which is in fact false at its root, and then by a so-called sociology. People claim there is no truth, and they assert this as true; they say that man can know nothing, but this is something they think they know; they claim that "life" takes precedence over thought, and yet this is something they think! People are so stupid they do not notice these contradictions.
Extract from a letter from Frithjof Schuon of 13 April 1974. — Frithjof Schuon

Women have talent and intelligence but, due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality. — Pratibha Patil

Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail. — Joe Pitkin

To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time. — John Dewey

We are then content with some well-intended speeches, and as far as the rest is concerned we would have to rely on God. As if "reliance on God" means a lack of intelligence or competence in action; as if the Qur'anic Revelation has not distinguished between orientation and state, between where we should be and where we are; between the actualised foundation of a social project and the well-intended expression of its form. — Tariq Ramadan

My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence. — Daniel Goleman

In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress. — Charles William Eliot

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization
our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity
to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. — John Ralston Saul

Miss Climpson," said Lord Peter, "is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity, Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers' money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Religion is a disease, a social cancer. It is the afterbirth of intelligence, of thought itself. — Ari Bach

Awareness is about improving social intelligence. If you can't see, hear, or feel the dynamics of a conversation, you can't manage them. — John Stoker

Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence. — Robert Greene

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top - the aristocracy of non-value. — Ayn Rand

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."(p.88) ... "Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph, — W.E.B. Du Bois

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and
our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our
souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect.
Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them
capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the
use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a
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goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them
intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of
whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains. — Victor Hugo

War is becoming an anachronism; if we have battled in every part of the continent it was because two opposing social orders were facing each other, the one which dates from 1789, and the old regime. They could not exist together; the younger devoured the other. I know very well, that, in the final reckoning, it was war that overthrew me, me the representative of the French Revolution, and the instrument of its principles. But no matter! The battle was lost for civilization, and civilization will inevitably take its revenge. There are two systems, the past and the future. The present is only a painful transition. Which must triumph? The future, will it not? Yes indeed, the future! That is, intelligence, industry, and peace. The past was brute force, privilege, and ignorance. Each of our victories was a triumph for the ideas of the Revolution. Victories will be won, one of these days, without cannon, and without bayonets. — Napoleon Bonaparte

The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals. — Steven Mithen

Although I do use some of my psychology training in comedy, but it's more like pop psychology, not a course of treatment or anything. To me, it's more like social intelligence. — Matt Walsh

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology. — Carl Schmitt

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Society is a cross-section of multiple dynamics..
A socially driven mind will have the capacity to digest all..
For purposes of understanding, learning, dissecting and knowing..
Criticizing what you don't understand or have never done yourself..
Shows lack of intelligence as well as lack of social mindedness... — Abha Maryada Banerjee

My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness. — Helen Keller

There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

We define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. — Peter Salovey

The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction. — Terry Winograd

Anti-social behaviour is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists. — Anonymous

People who are told that they have performed poorly on a test of social intelligence think extra hard to find reasons to discount the test; people who are asked to read a study showing that one of their habits - such as drinking coffee - is unhealthy think extra hard to find flaws in the study, flaws that people who don't drink coffee don't notice. Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified. — Jonathan Haidt

No matter what advantages you are born with
money, intelligence, an appealing personality, a sunny outlook, or good social connections
none of these provides a magic key to an easy existence. Somehow life manages to bring difficult problems, the causes of untold suffering and struggle. How you meet your challenges makes all the difference between the promise of success and the specter of failure. — Deepak Chopra

Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive. — Edward O. Wilson

[I]t is indisputably the mediocre, if not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence, who succeed in life and multiply the fastest. — Alfred Russel Wallace

Men of all social stations live together: they are equal in their desires, yet vary in their methods; they are equal in their passions, yet different in their intelligence; that is their nature-given vitality. — Xunzi

All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it. — Marcel Proust

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don't have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don't. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state. — David Graeber

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action. — Daniel Goleman

The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast "antipolitics machine", sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public--while excluding the public from debate--that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely taking transparent technical calculations. — James C. Scott

We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess. — Elbert Hubbard

One sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women . — Henry George

A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF attacked "both aspects of Hamas - its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing," the latter a euphemism for the civilian society. — Noam Chomsky

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills
literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. — Julian Barnes

To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion.Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves - that is, means for the ends of others. — John Dewey

Your intelligence is so deeply entangled with the social identification that you have taken on, your brains are not working in line with the life within you; it is working against your own life. That is the source of misery. — Jaggi Vasudev

I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean. — C.P. Snow

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike. — Daniel Goleman

In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does. — Bryan Caplan

But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind ... — Katherine Anne Porter

[T]he narrative intelligences of our books should leave us feeling a bit pressed intellectually, a bit outmatched, amazed ultimately by the talent of the author who brought such an exquisite intelligence to life." (from article "From the Library of Your Soul-Mate: The Unique Social Bond of Literature") — Bryan Basamanowicz

The remedy for our social evils does not consist so much in changing the system of government as it does in increasing the general intelligence of the people so that they may learn how to govern. — Charles Lindbergh

If an AI possessed any one of these skills - social abilities, technological development, economic ability - at a superhuman level, it is quite likely that it would quickly come to dominate our world in one way or another. And as we've seen, if it ever developed these abilities to the human level, then it would likely soon develop them to a superhuman level. So we can assume that if even one of these skills gets programmed into a computer, then our world will come to be dominated by AIs or AI-empowered humans. — Stuart Armstrong

The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The person who has power may influence the material or social environment, generally on the basis of possessing high-tech weapons, money, oil, superior intelligence or large muscles. In war, I am powerful because I can blow up your city walls or drop bombs on your airfields. In the financial world, I am powerful because I can buy up your shares and invade your markets. In boxing, I am ,ore powerful because my punches outwit and exhaust yours. But in love, this issue appears to depend on a far more passive, negative definition; instead of looking at power as a capacity to do something, one may come to think of it as the capacity to do nothing. — Alain De Botton