Marilyn Vos Savant Quotes

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

I believe that love--not imitation--is the sincerest form of flattery. Your imitator thinks that you can be duplicated; your lover knows you can't.

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.

If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another ,before you do anything,you should first decide wether you have a better head or a better heart.

Avoid using cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs as alternatives to being an interesting person.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying.

If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another ,before you do anything,you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart.

I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children in modern society] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there, and they are taught and told what to believe; they are passive from the very beginning – and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told?

Be able to go shopping for a bathing suit and not become depressed afterward.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.

An act of justice closes the book on a misdeed; an act of vengeance writes one of its own.

Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians and scientists. Here are some of the things they said: 'I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error.' -Robert Sachs, Ph.D., George Mason University ... 'I am sure you will receive many letters from high school and college students. Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for future columns.' -W. Robert Smith, Ph.D., Georgia State University... 'If all those Ph.D.'s were wrong, the country would be in very serious trouble.' -Everett Harman, Ph.D., U.S. Army Research Institute

It’s a sad day when so many people shirk the most basic responsibilities of life that simply being respectable becomes behavior worthy of special attention. In other words, I think the people you describe are doing what they should. A society has weak values when it regards going to work every day and taking care of your family as heroic.

Remember, time is the most precious commodity we have, and under the stresses and pressures of everyday contemporary life, we often trade it for less than its real value. Everything we do is time-consuming, but very few things are time-repaying.

In my opinion, defining intelligence is much like defining beauty, and I don’t mean that it’s in the eye of the beholder. To illustrate, let’s say that you are the only beholder, and your word is final. Would you be able to choose the 1000 most beautiful women in the country? And if that sounds impossible, consider this: Say you’re now looking at your picks. Could you compare them to each other and say which one is more beautiful? For example, who is more beautiful— Katie Holmes or Angelina Jolie? How about Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones? I think intelligence is like this. So many factors are involved that attempts to measure it are useless. Not that IQ tests are useless. Far from it. Good tests work: They measure a variety of mental abilities, and the best tests do it well. But they don’t measure intelligence itself.

I enjoy reading Marilyn vos Savant’s column in Sunday’s Parade magazine. Listed in Guinness World Records for “Highest IQ,

In my opinion, heroes exist in different degrees, like great men and women: some are even greater than others. But in essence, I believe that a hero is a person who risks his or her own life—maybe even losing it—in a selfless, successful effort to save the life of another. For example, if a mother dives into a river to save her struggling child, she isn’t really a hero; but if she dives into a river to save a struggling child unknown to her, she is clearly a hero if she is successful and if not, she certainly behaved heroically. Likewise, acts of self-defense, even when the lives of others also are at stake, do not quite rise to the level of heroism, although they may be courageous. In addition, the degree of individual heroism grows with various factors, such as nobility of purpose, the degree of risk, and so on. So wartime itself does not produce heroes; instead, it awakens the giants among us.

What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from".