Quotes About Knowledge

Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Education is an admirable thing," wrote Oscar Wilde, "but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

There are but three groups worthy of respect," wrote Charles Baudelaire, "the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

Enlightenment's motto, he proclaimed, is "Dare to understand!" and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

Steven Pinker

Ä°nsanlar dil konusunda merakl? olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ula??labilir k?sm?d?r. Ä°nsanlar dil hakk?nda bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doÄŸas?n?n iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceÄŸini bilirler.

never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

But the most powerful contributor was science. "It is knowledge that is the key," Deaton argues. "Income—although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing . . .—is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.

education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability. If that sounds mystical or paradoxical, think about the probability that a coin I just flipped landed heads. For you, it's .5. For me, it's 1 (I peeked). Same event, different knowledge, different probability.