Quotes About Knowledge

they spoke of what they knew

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.

What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.

The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.

practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.

Have you gone crazy, Lefty?" "No. On the contrary, I have become educated." "Sometimes that's worse, these days.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity.

Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills—and such differences create differences in economic outcomes.

The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses ("there is no free lunch") and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitious social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.

To refer to Stuyvesant High School as a "privileged little ivory tower" may be clever, but cleverness is not wisdom.

The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge—and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

While years of education are often used as a rough proxy for human capital in general, not only is much human capital gained outside of educational institutions,[...]some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations, and aversions that negatively impact the economy.