Quotes About Knowledge

I learned how to be a learner. When you get in a job, the tendency is to say, 'I've got to know it. I've got to give direction to others. I'm in this job because I'm better and smarter.' I always took a different view, that the key was to identify the people who really knew and learn from them.

There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

When you get in a job, the tendency is to say, 'I've got to know it. I've got to give direction to others. I'm in this job because I'm better and smarter.' I always took a different view, that the key was to identify the people who really knew and learn from them.

Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

Israel, in general, should learn from other nations. We have a tendency to teach the world. In many cases, we should learn from the world, because they make advances.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

We try to do a great job of understanding the opposing hitter and his tendencies. Maybe understand the hitter better than he knows himself.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

We are a very youth-driven culture, and I don't really know why because wisdom tends to come with more years, not fewer.

When I do read, it tends to be serious books like autobiographies and if I've met a famous person, I'll read up on them.

I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.

I don't know much about Mauresmo apart from the fact she played great tennis. Is she a good technician? I don't know those parameters.

When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It's billions to tens of billions.

You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on political consultants to tell you what you think when you already know what you think.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

I research every possible bit of information I can find. Then I use about a tenth of it. But I have to know all the information first; otherwise, I'm not going to convince myself, and if I can't convince myself, then I'm not going to convince the reader.

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

The biggest learning during my tenure as a captain was that, a lot of time, I used to think that this is common sense. But no, there is nothing called common sense.

I pretty much left full-time, formal education when I was 11, so that was when I was taken out of the school system... The longest stretch I would go back for was a term and a half when I was about 14.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.