Quotes About Knowledge

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

There is a bitter lament from Egypt's first great popular uprising that reveals the indignation of the upper classes, because the lower orders had broken into their precincts, and not merely turned their wives into prostitutes, but, what seemed equally bad, captured knowledge that had been withheld from them. "The writings of the august enclosure [the temple] are read....The place of secrets...is [now] laid bare....Magic is exposed." (Admonitions of Ipu-wer: 2300-2050 B.C.?)

When I was your age I knew how to listen to television and learn a few things.

Harris loved to read and he shared everything he read. He read to whoever happened to be in the room from whatever paper he happened to be making his way through. Ann Landers and the horoscope, of course, headlines, cartoons, Miss Manners, Heloise, the lives of others, in many forms, long articles on astronomy or anthropology, political pieces, op-ed pieces, book reviews, church bazaars, executions, plane crashes, disco artists, whatever caught his interest.

What keeps me going are my learnings, which I would rather call my 'experience,' and my urge to explore.

As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that's the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.

It's fine to seek professional help, but I urge everyone - no matter how big their portfolio - to truly understand every suggestion they're given before acting.

I'm afraid I have an incurable urge for teaching.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

Today more than ever we need creative minds to address the issues of the age. And one of the most urgent is this: How can humanity know so much, achieve so much, and still fail so many people so badly?

The most urgent task of any college is the transmission of knowledge, pure and simple.

Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it's not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. But we have a way of understanding human life that you can't get anywhere else, and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

This life that has been given to us as a gift, as such a precious gift. To really try to understand it, really try to recognize it, is the greatest meditation. Through the media of this Knowledge we can tap into our inner sources that are so beautiful.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I got a lot of my film education from sneaking into media labs at USC. I probably owe USC a lot of money.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

I went to USC and tried to learn about the other side of the camera a little bit.

I studied film studies at USC.