Life & Wisdom Quote by Edgar Rice Burroghs

Burroughs yanks imagination out of the nursery and shoves it into the engine room. Calling it "another name for super intelligence" is a deliberate provocation from a pulp-era writer who was often treated as a dispenser of escapism: the line insists that the very faculty critics dismissed as juvenile fantasy is, in fact, cognition at its most extreme. He is arguing for imagination as a kind of apex problem-solving, not a decorative talent but a mental technology.

The phrasing is slyly defensive. "But another name" suggests a rebranding, as if society has been flattering itself by reserving "intelligence" for the measurable and respectable while relegating imagination to the unserious. Burroughs collapses that hierarchy. In his worlds, survival and heroism depend less on schooling than on the capacity to improvise, to model unseen systems, to anticipate adversaries, to build coherent realities from incomplete data. That is intelligence, just expressed through narrative rather than numbers.

Context matters: Burroughs wrote at a time when modernity was worshipping the machine, the laboratory, the new "scientific" management of life. His own success came through mass magazines, a space where the future was being collectively daydreamed into existence. The quote reads like a manifesto for speculative fiction itself: if you can imagine Martian civilizations or lost jungles, you're practicing the same mental leap that invents airplanes, propaganda, or empires. The subtext is both proud and warning: imagination isn't a soft power. It's the power that makes everything else possible.