Quotes About Understanding

In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it's doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's happening.

You aren't supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That's a very dangerous idea, and therefore it's been wiped out of history.

Philosophers often appear to intend to want to get answers about humans that we can't get about insects, and that's too much, yaknow?

The more you learn, the more you realize the less you know. You think you're approaching some kind of horizon, but in fact the horizon is receding, and the more you learn, the more you see that horizon is very far away. Life would be pretty boring if we understood everything so better that we don't understand everything

The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries.

Necesitamos llegar a comprender las relaciones entre los objetos.

Una empresa intelectual más ambiciosa origina una coherente comprensión del mundo.

Our own accumulated experience becomes increasingly solidified over time. That is, we start to think we know how the world works, and things that accord with that evolving viewpoint we take in much more easily than things that seem to contradict how we think the world works. This evolution is a kind of ongoing process to the extent that we need to understand further and further how the world works.

It's also important here to distinguish between what's possible to know and understand firsthand from information that must be delivered second-, third-, fourth-hand by a various media; that is, mediated information, which is more and more the case. I mean, we know less and less about the world firsthand than we do through other sources of information.

La escuela impide la difusión de verdades esenciales.

The interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

An essential mechanism of censorship, in Orwell's view, is a good education. If you've gone to the best schools, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say, or, we may add, even to think. It all becomes part of your being. And if you're a good student and have properly absorbed the lessons, you can become a responsible intellectual. That's the unpublished preface to Animal Farm.

Consciousness is some kind of peripheral thing which picks up some of what's going on in our head.

anyone can consider what he now knows and can ask what he knew twenty years ago, and can see that in some unclear fashion he was striving towards something which he can only now understand … if he is fortunate.

lo que debemos hacer es tratar de entender la verdad acerca del mundo. Y la verdad acerca del mundo es generalmente bastante fea.

if people want to be confused, they will always succeed, no matter what term you use.

language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

Since democratic leaders can't wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding and have to engineer consent to socially constructive goals and values, some obvious questions arise. Who makes the decisions about these goals and values? What factors enter into the decisions of "democratic leaders"? How is their "responsibility" and dedication to the public interest established?

In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.

If the traditional victims see matters somewhat differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual backwardness. And

Whenever I hear a four-syllable word I get skeptical, because I want to make sure you can't say it in monosyllables.

It doesn't matter what we cover, it matters what you discover

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.