Marilyn vos Savant Quotes

“A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does.”

“A friend is someone who stays by your side all through the troubles he's caused you.”

“A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.”

“Almost all of the finer things in life are free or nearly free. You don't have to pay for the sky at night or snow in the morning or a kiss on the nose when you're sick. Forgetting that may put you at the mercy of those who seek to profit by convincing you to want whatever it is they have to sell.”

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

“An error becomes a mistake when we refuse to admit it.”

“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.”

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

“Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.”

“Be able to cite three good qualities of every relative or acquaintance that you dislike.”

“Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion.”

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

“Be able to notice all the confusion between fact and opinion that appears in the news.”

“Be in the habit of getting up bright and early on the weekends. Why waste such precious time in bed?”

“Be sure to expose yourself to criticism: A fine polish requires an abrasive.”

“Common sense comes from experience, and kids need to fail as well as succeed in order to learn it. It's difficult to develop common sense when you spend a lot of time in your room where nothing much happens.”

“Feeling is what you get for thinking the way you do.”

“Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or – worse – having empty opinions.”

“Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?”

“How can we live in freedom and maintain that we are entitled to *anything* that we can't get without the labor of others? Remember, if we are entitled to the labor of others, that makes slaves of those others.”

“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.”

“I believe that one becomes stronger emotionally by taking life less personally. If your employer criticizes your report, don't take it personally. Instead, find out what's needed and fix it.

If your girlfriend laughs at your tie, don't take it personally. Find another tie or find another girlfriend.”

“I love having ten times as much stuff to do as I can possibly find time to do. That way, I can pick the one-tenth that I want to do most.

But if I only have enough to just occupy all my time, I'm stuck doing all of whatever stuff it happens to be.”

“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?”

“I've never found an interesting person with a foul mouth.”

“If achieving your potential requires favorable judgment by others, you are much less likely to succeed.”

“If you never heard opportunity knock, maybe you're never at home.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”