Quotes About Understanding

After watching what has happened over the past fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and seeing the money that is to be made from such ventures, I wonder if the adage should have a corollary: 'Those who understand the lessons of history are only too happy to repeat them.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Women, Thumps decided years ago, had a need to know what people around them were doing every minute of the day. It wasn't curiosity exactly, and it wasn't control. It was more as though they were keeping track of the world so that if anyone hit them with a pop quiz, they'd have the right answer.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.

Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong

What about human beings? said the animals. Do you think we need human beings? Why not? said the Twins. And as quick as they could the right-handed Twin created women, and the left-handed Twin created men. They don't look too bright, said the animals. We hope they won't be a problem. Don't worry, said the Twins, you guys are going to get along just fine.

Why do we ask the important questions after they've been answered?

There is no greater wisdom than kindness

Clarity affords focus.

The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn't fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge?

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

reason is merely the mouthpiece of emotion.

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

He said to me, 'The book has found its reader,' and what could I do but agree with him?

might just as well ask how you knew how to do the things you did.

I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions---only those who do it well and those who don't.

From this it can be proved that the Arcadian mathematics, so primitive in other respects, is based upon a shrewd understanding of the physical properties of soap bubbles. ("Et in Arcadia Ego")

We are supposed to "agree to disagree," a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we're just being jerks, apparently. It

Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.

The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don't know much about a subject do not know when they're in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they're failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. Even

The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It's an old saying, but it's true: it ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you do know that ain't so.

Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument. Education

Why can't people simply accept these differences in knowledge or competence? This is an unreasonable question, since it amounts to saying "Why don't people just accept that other people are smarter than they are?" (Or, conversely, "Why don't smart people just explain why other people are dumber than they are?") The reality is that social insecurity trips up both the smart and the dumb. We all want to be liked. In

Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.