“With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them.”

—  Galileo Galilei

Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they atte…" by Galileo Galilei?
Galileo Galilei photo
Galileo Galilei 70
Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer 1564–1642

Related quotes

Idries Shah photo

“When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.”

Idries Shah (1924–1996) writer and Sufi teacher
Konrad Lorenz photo

“Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.”

Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) Austrian zoologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.
John P. Kotter photo

“Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Introduction to the 2002 edition, p. 2
The Heart of Change, (2002)

Don Henley photo

“I've been learning to live without you now
But I miss you sometimes
The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning them again.”

Don Henley (1947) American singer, lyricist, producer and drummer

"The Heart of the Matter"
Song lyrics, The End of the Innocence (1989)

“Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 68

“Mankind has always argued about justice and injustice, while social scientists and politicians have endlessly discussed the conditions which make justice more or less attainable. These essays discuss a more philosophical issue-what justice is and why it matters. Although their authors were philosophers, few of them were 'professional ' philosophers…”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

Justice (1993)

Sylvia Plath photo

“I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Shunryu Suzuki photo

“Communication is — start by understanding — your own understanding about people. Even though you want them to understand you, you know, it is — unless you understand people, it is almost impossible.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Sun-Faced Buddha, Moon-Faced Buddha lecture at the Zen Mountain Center (17 August 1971) http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/archives/index.cgi/710817V.html
Context: Communication is — start by understanding — your own understanding about people. Even though you want them to understand you, you know, it is — unless you understand people, it is almost impossible. Don't you think so? Only when you understand people, they may understand you. So even though you do not say anything, if you understand people there is some communication.

James Weldon Johnson photo

“The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.”

James Weldon Johnson book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, ch. 2 (1912).

Related topics