“There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 11
Context: There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew.
There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and could put it all to use.
Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.

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Clifford D. Simak 137
American writer, journalist 1904–1988

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“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Misattributed

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“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

A variation on a quotation of Alexander Pope, attributed to Einstein in various recent sources, such as Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine (2006), p. 176 http://books.google.com/books?id=OqbMnWDKIJ4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA176#v=onepage&q&f=false, and at the start of the 2006 pilot episode of the television series Eureka. The oldest published source located attributing this to Einstein is the 2004 book Strategic Investment: Real Options and Games by Han T. J. Smit and Lenos Trigeorgis, p. 429 http://books.google.com/books?id=pN41ZtNoqBEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA429#v=onepage&q&f=false, and before that it was attributed to him on the internet, the earliest example found being this post from 19 May 1995 http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.physhare/msg/ef186aec3bf66ba6. But long before that, the same quote appears in an advertisement for Encyclopaedia Britannica that ran in The Atlantic Monthly: Volume 216 from 1965, p. 139 http://books.google.com/books?id=TuMmAQAAIAAJ&q=%22so+is+a+lot%22#search_anchor. The ad mentioned Einstein but did not directly attribute the quote to him: "Encyclopaedia Britannica says: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot. The more you know, the more you need to know — as Albert Einstein, for one, might have told you. Great knowledge has a way of bringing with it great responsibility. The people who put the Encyclopaedia Britannica together feel the same way. After all, if most of the world had come to count on you as the best single source of complete, accurate, up-to-date information on everything, you'd want to be pretty sure you knew what you were talking about."
Misattributed

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