#clever

Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good? ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#choice #cleverness #good-looks #questions #beauty

Clever tyrants are never punished. ↗

— Voltaire

#never #punished #tyrants

Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming! ↗

— Ricky Gervais

#clever #coming #executed #glasses #had

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes. ↗

— Leon Kass

#cleverness #far #how #how far #limits

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child. ↗

— Mary A. Ward

#any #awoke #begin #child #clever

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time. ↗

— Carolyn Wells

#blunder #cleverness #moment #right #right moment

I don't really wanna talk about politics, I'm not clever enough. ↗

— Paul Weller

#clever #enough #i #politics #really

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#clever people #journalists #lawyers #now #people

There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea. ↗

— Al Yankovic

#clever #enough #good #i #idea

Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cleverness #myths #people #primitive #humor