Quotes About Knowledge

Only by understanding the past may we free ourselves from its tyranny.

In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.

Ignorance is a menace to peace.

He liked to say that what makes literature is "inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.

I know everything I know about.

I have always liked what the Scarecrow said to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. "Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

Science appears to be the human enterprise that is most systematic in its attempt to eliminate error in the search for knowledge.

Absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached.

French mathematician Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963): "The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain." I

Reading an endless litany of study after study-one article found this, and another experiment found this, and another study found this-is like watching laundry spinning in a dryer, except that something good eventually comes out of a dryer!

What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and calls it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization.

What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and call it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization... But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair.

If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.

When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves the most pity?" Each of the guests responded, but the answer that is still remembered is Benjamin Franklins's: "A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read.

In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

In the scientific world, the syndrome known as 'great man's disease' happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.

It is better to let people think you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

He had no idea whether his facts were right, but he suspected that the Doctor was often in the same position.

He shuddered because he was seized--suddenly and almost hauntingly--by the knowledge that love was magic, more wonderful than all that had gone before, deep, painful, and inescapable...

the question falls within the penumbra of the detective's expertise.

Philosophers and poets may be truth seekers. Lawyers only want to win.

A wise man states as true nothing he cannot prove

Granny said. "Only fellow my age I know still got lead in his pencil.