Quotes About Knowledge

Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on.

Anybody who changes their religion does so because they haven't understood their own", he responded to my surprise. He then took down a copy of the Bible and turned to the first pages of Genesis. He then read out a verse "Do not bite off the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Every time I learn the truth about something, I'm disappointed

The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better—not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you.

We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.

In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

But part of me knows there's an intangible downside to having complete intellectual detachment from whatever most Americans consider to be common knowledge.

I'm sure I could have read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth.

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

So this, I suspect, is where we really begin: In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything.

I would never directly contradict anything Neil deGrasse Tyson says, because—compared to Neil deGrasse Tyson—my skull is a bag of hammers.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.