Quotes About Knowledge

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.

From my informal surveys, it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.

us measure progress not by what is discovered but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.

Science, then, is the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.

The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People's stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

Twain said: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Mark Twain said: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative.

new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new "outlooks." (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term "outlook" is the German Fragestellung—literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)

Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced.

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology.

Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.

Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.")

that's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn.

In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

After the visit, George wrote an essay, "Turing's Cathedral," which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google's founders had in store for the world. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of his hosts after his talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI.

This is the tome that guides haruspication—I mean, psychiatry.)

If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we could implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don't bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us.