Quotes About Knowledge

I don't want to start speculating. First we need facts." I

Very few men attain enough of human knowledge to be fully aware how much remains to be learned, and of that which they never can hope to acquire.

If mankind conversed only of the things they understood, half the words might be struck out of the dictionaries.

Che diritto hanno i cristiani bianchi di vantarsi del loro sapere, mentre un indiano è in grado di leggere una lingua che sarebbe troppo oscura per il più saggio di loro?

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before

Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

Plato is my friend, but truth my greater friend.

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;           Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.           All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,           All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,           But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Information is closely associated with uncertainty." Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

Wikipedia features a popular article called "Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia." This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing.

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: "He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.

the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: "Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library." As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

I am somebody who has always struggled with uncertainty. And, of course, uncertainty is so core to life. I seek out knowledge to help me deal with that. But I'm also aware that knowledge can be really a double-edged sword.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man's uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous.

That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.

I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

My uncle is a mechanic, and I wish I had paid more attention, but I never did.

Quizzing is a family hobby - before I was born my granddad, mum, auntie and uncle were into quizzing.