Albert Einstein:

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein:

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Albert Einstein:

Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.

Alexander Hamilton:

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Arthur Conan Doyle, sr.:

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

Bruce Feirstein:

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Carl Sagan:

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Dorothy Thompson:

The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

Elbert Hubbard:

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Since when was genius found respectable?

Fulton J. Sheen:

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Joe Theisman:

The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

NFL football quarterback and sports analyst

Madame de Stael:

Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.

Mark Twain:

The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.

Oscar Levant:

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.

Seneca:

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

William James:

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.