Ingenuity Quotes

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. (George S. Patton)
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. View quote
Douglas Adams
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead. View quote
John Updike
Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express. View quote
William Cobbett
We need American sources of resources, we need American energy, brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers. View quote
Sarah Palin
It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom. View quote
Max Born
Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. View quote
Wyndham Lewis
Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat. View quote
Winston Churchill
There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity. View quote
Richard Anthony Proctor
Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve. (Edgar Allan Poe)
By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country. View quote
Nancy Pelosi
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands. View quote
Camille Paglia
All the ingenuity, all the high-tech gear, all the jury-rigging-sometimes the sea would rip it all away until there was only you, the Creator, and His mercy. View quote
Abby Sunderland
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity. View quote
Arnold Bennett
I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. View quote
William Cowper
Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon. View quote
Terry Brooks
I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow. View quote
E. B. White
...ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth. (William Faulkner)
You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." View quote
Le Corbusier
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. View quote
Alan Turing
The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time.... the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of thought. View quote
Ludwig Boltzmann
Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis. View quote
Isaac Newton