Quotes About Knowledge

if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

The most educated person in the world now has to admit—I shall not say confess—that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

In point of fact, we do not have the option of choosing absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive - or to intimidate - others.

Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?

The most arresting thing about Palin, indeed, is the absolutely unbreachable serenity of her ignorance. She already has all the information she requires.

If belief in a god has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof.

We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them. Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.

Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge ( as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs.)

there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Öyle konular vard?r ki yaÅŸamda, sana soruluncaya kadar kendin bile bunlar? bildiÄŸini bilmezsin.

You're a nice boy, she chuckled harshly. You must come round here one evening. I'll teach you something you didn't know before.

it's about experience. They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience—and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?

A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about.

Laypeople. They think everything in the past happened at the same time.

You could always go back to school," Louise said. "You're never too old to learn." "But there's just so much. Not just this world, but so many others. By the time I got caught up, I would be too old." "To spend the rest of your life learning?" Louise asked, shaking her head in wonderment. "What could be better than that?" Such a twenty-fourth-century attitude, Clare thought.

Lucsly glanced back. "That's just it. I'm not supposed to know." He paused. "A history of race hatred . . . a self-serving demagogue stirring up new resentments for his own ends . . . you don't need time travel to predict where that's heading. It's up

Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view. It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic in other words, as politically suspect.

Faustus: «Come, I think hell's a fable». Mephistopheles: «Ay, think so still, until experience change thy mind».

I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

I'le burne my bookes; ah Mephostophilis.

All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?