Robert

“Even worse, those with accomplishments worthy of the designation
"genius" do not always make the IQ cut. When Terman first used the IQ test to select a sample of child geniuses, he unknowingly excluded a special child whose IQ did not make the grade. Yet a few decades later that overlooked talent received the Nobel Prize in physics: William Shockley, the cocreator of the transistor. Ironically, not one of the more than 1,500 children who qualified according to his IQ criterion received so high an honor as adults. Clearly, a Nobel laureate has much greater claim to the term genius than those whose achievements did not win them such applause.”
― Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity

“There is a crucial difference between the acceptance of limitations and the impulse to reduce everything exalted to its lowest common denominator. “Acceptance” becomes shameless, cynical surrender when it can no longer distinguish between nobility and pomposity, refinement of taste and social snobbery, modesty and prudery. Cynicism confuses delusions of grandeur, which call for moral and therapeutic correction, with grandeur itself.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“if you want to get people to do something for you, you do it with them.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“We mortals are the immortals' work battalion.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco