Totally disagree. People like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc were brilliant men. They were evil, but they were brilliant. Ted Kazcynski and many other criminals are also considered brilliant.

I think they were intelligent, sure. But as I said, I think brilliant has a positive connotation, where intelligent is more neutral.

Mao, Stalin, and Hitler weren't brilliant at anything except being ambitious, amoral, and rather deluded. Their only real talents were a flair for populist rhetoric and a knack for brutally eliminating and repressing political opposition using methods that morally normal people recoil from.

None was particularly effective as a military commander - which is something we should be grateful for, because if the Nazis had been ruled by someone with the military skills of Napoleon or Julius Caesar we'd all be fluent in German and xenophobia.

In fact they all did huge physical and psychological damage to their countries - something a genuinely brilliant political leader would have avoided.

I looked at the synonyms and I have to disagree with your opinion. Can you elaborate on which synonyms gave you this impression?

When I search Google for "brilliant" it gives these: "gifted, talented, virtuoso, genius, accomplished, ingenious, masterly, inventive, creative; intelligent, bright, clever, smart, astute, acute, brainy, intellectual, profound; skillful, able, expert, adept, elite, superior, crack, choice, first-class, first-rate, excellent; educated, scholarly, learned, erudite, cerebral; precocious". It cites that to english.oxforddictionaries.com.

And maybe three of those could lean towards morality. Someone could be a gifted sniper, a talented warmonger, an evil genius, an accomplished pick pocket, a creative criminal, an educated Ponzi scheme operator, or a profound mass murderer.

My point is that it's not a socially neutral term. Those are almost all positive associations in the synonyms.

I also think most of your phrases aren't things people would actually write, in that the adjective tone is dissonant with the noun. The one exception is evil genius, where I think the dissonance is the point.

Probably the synonyms in definition 3 here, like splendid, marvelous, wonderful, awesome? https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...