The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Walter Lippmann

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
Walter Lippmann

All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us.
Heinrich Himmler

Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public's desire for him to be funny simply because he's so good at it.
Ben Stiller

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
Denis Diderot

The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.
Denis Diderot

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.
Denis Diderot

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
Denis Diderot

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
Leo Burnett

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.
Mario Puzo

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard

When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.
George Clooney

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
E. M. Forster

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud

Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
Washington Irving