Quotes About Knowledge

Poverty, sickness, wars, famines old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.

In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.

The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is built on existing knowledge

the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. With

One of the wonderful things about science is that when scientists don't know something, they can try out all kinds of theories and conjunctures, but in the end they can just admit their ignorance. The

how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing. 2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.

the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world.

Even if you don't know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future.

The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge.

within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust the Google search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: searching for relevant and trustworthy information. We no longer search for information. Instead, we google

Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way.

if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less.

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what's going on.

there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe.