Quotes About Knowledge

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.

I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.

It's the writing that teaches you.

Education isn't something you can finish.

They were scientists enough to admit that they were wrong.

You don't need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Encyclopedias don't win wars.

All knowledge is one. When a light brightens and illuminates a corner of a room, it adds to the general illumination of the entire room. Over and over again, scientific discoveries have provided answers to problems that had no apparent connection with the phenomena that gave rise to the discovery.

How harmful overspecialization is. It cuts knowledge at a million points and leaves it bleeding.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.

Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, How did you learn all this, Isaac? From you, Pappa, I said. From me? I don't know any of this. You didn't have to, Pappa, I said. You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.

The Earth, he said, is a large and very complex lifeboat. We still do not know what can or can't be done with a proper distribution of resources and it is notorious that to this very day we have not really made an effort to distribute them. In many places on Earth, food is wasted daily, and it is that knowledge that drives hungry men mad.

They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.

The secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all.

He supposed it was inevitable. Dip a person into one particular specialty deeply enough and long enough, and he would automatically begin to assume that specialists in all other fields were magicians, judging the depth of their wisdom by the breadth of his own ignorance...

Space, man, have you no respect for science?

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.