Quotes about knowledge
page 14

“Innovation plans, by contrast, are loaded with assumptions. Sure, some hard facts are available, but more is unknown than known. The past is no longer precedent. Thus, the innovator's job cannot be to deliver a proven result; it must be to discover what is possible, that is, to learn, by converting assumptions into knowledge as quickly and inexpensively as possible.”

Vijay Govindarajan (1949) American academic

Vijay Govindarajan, ‎Chris Trimble (2013), The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. p. 18

Learning, Past

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Death, Children, World

“With the support of Universal knowledge and our heritage, we shall create a Bharat which will excel all its past glories, and will enable every citizen in its fold to steadily progress in the development of his manifold latent possibilities and to achieve through a sense of unity with the entire creation, a state even higher than that of a complete human being; to become Narayan from nar (man). This is the external divine form of our culture. This is our message to humanity at a cross roads. May God give us strength to succeed in this mission.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Deendayal Upadhyaya , Integral Humanism, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

God, Support, Sense, Universe

“It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.”

Sally Ride (1951–2012) American physicist and astronaut

Scholastic interview (1998)

Time, Training

“The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 9, p. 40
Leviathan (1651)

History

“[His work is addressed]… not to the learned and experienced mathematicians who are already, or should be, better acquainted with them… [and most of whom] have studied mechanics more as a subject of curiosity and a hobby, than with any view of service to the public. The people we had in mind were rather the mechanic, handicraftsman and the like, who, without education or knowledge of foreign languages have no access to many sources of information…”

Jacob Leupold (1674–1727) German multidisciplinary scientist

Jacob Leupold (1724-39) Theatrium machinarum, as quoted in: Biography of Jacob Leupold (1674–1727) http://history-computer.com/People/LeupoldBio.html on history-computer.com, 2013

People, Education, Study, Learning

“We shall envision the mind (or brain) as composed of many partially autonomous "agents"—as a "Society" of smaller minds. …It is easiest to think about partial states that constrain only agents within a single Division. …(we suggest) the local mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be the precursors of what we know later as reasoning”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Way, Thinking

“The pioneering practitioners of the new science knew that they were producing a new kind of knowledge and so they declared this newness in the titles of their books and articles. Thus we have Galileo's Two New Sciences, Boyle's New Experiments, Kepler's New Astronomy, and Tartaglia's New Science. When Ben Jonson presented a masque entitled "News from the New World," his new world was not the newly found continent of North America, but the new world of science, the world revealed by the telescope of Galileo.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (2005)

Books, World, Science

“Confronted with such a variety most philosophers try to establish one approach to the exclusion of all others. As far as they are concerned there can only be one true way- and they want to find it. Thus normative philosophers argue that knowledge is a result of the application of certain rules, they propose rules which in their opinion constitute knowledge and reject what clashes with them.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

Pg 84.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

Way

“Objectivism's philosophy of man begins with the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness: man is the one animal who has to choose to be conscious, to use his mind. Man is a rational animal, and reason is his only guide to knowledge, reason being that faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

“The Contradiction in Objectivism,” 1968

Sense, Animals

“I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

The Power of Myth (1988)

Life, Thinking

“The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. V: Of the Wings of Atalanta

Life, Secret, School, Teachers

“One must forget many clichés in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. … Insight is knowledge at first sight.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Introduction
The Prophets (1962)

Way, Thinking, Past, Forgetting

“Nations are divided into "good"and "bad"-the enemy is all bad, one's own nation is of spotless virtue. Wars are either acts of God or acts of the other nations, which always catch us completely by surprise. To a student of international systems the national image even of respectable, intellectual, and powerful people seems naive and untrue. The patriotism of the sophisticated cannot be a simple faith. There is, however, in the course of human history a powerful and probably irreversible movement toward sophistication. We can wise up, but we cannot wise down, except at enormous cost in the breakdown of civilizations, and not even a major breakdown results in much loss of knowledge.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 131

God, War, People, Faith

“Can we afford to let Laloo, whose knowledge of anything except caste structures is non-existent, damage the rural economy further? The long-suffering railway ministry, which has by now lost its ability to resist any absurd decision by any of their ministers, has agreed to budget Rs 250 crore a year to buy kulhars. While all that money comes from your pocket, where will it actually go?”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

Criticising Railway Minister Lalu Prasad's plan to introduce disposable clay-cups or kulhars to serve tea in trains, as quoted in "Clay-Pot Dictator!" http://www.outlookindia.com/article/claypot-dictator/224296, Outlook India (28 June 2004) 2001-2010

Money, Decision, Suffering

“The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.”

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

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Life, Children, Mathematics, Learning

“In every nation thou beholdest unnumbered spiritual leaders who are bereft of true discernment, and among every people thou dost encounter myriads of adherents who are devoid of the same characteristic. Ponder for a while in thy heart, have pity on thyself and turn not aside thine attention from proofs and evidences. However, seek not proofs and evidences after thine idle fancy; but rather base thy proofs upon what God hath appointed. Moreover, know thou that neither being a man of learning nor being a follower is in itself a source of glory. If thou art a man of learning, thy knowledge becometh an honour, and if thou art a follower, thine adherence unto leadership becometh an honour, only when these conform to the good-pleasure of God.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Dalá’Il-I-Sab‘ih

God, People, Pleasure, Art

“I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling letters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.””

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Mechanism in thought and morals https://books.google.se/books?id=c5rOGqwLGaEC&lpg=PA47 : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870 Mechanism in thought and morals (1871)

Children, Truth, Smile, Music

“And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small... orthodox scientist who won't recognize as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.”

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) American psychologist

As quoted in New Pathways In Psychology (1972) by Colin Wilson
1970s and later

Reality, Science

“I think the SDP really is a very right-wing party. In a funny way it’s more right-wing than Mrs. Thatcher because Mrs. Thatcher is an old-fashioned liberal, if you know what I mean, she believes in market forces and small government. But my knowledge and experience of the SDP is that they believe in a centralised system, they believe in a federal Europe in which we would only be a province under Brussels, they believe in retaining the American bases, they want a statutory pay policy so they would govern the wages of everybody without proper negotiation. I think they're a very hard right party and I think the Labour Party which has now got a decent policy as a result of all the work we’ve done is going to pick up a lot of support this year.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Afternoon Plus on ITN (29 January 1982)
1980s

Way, Fashion, Support, Thinking

“Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go. That's your charge.”

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) American author, historian and broadcaster

David R. Brower, in an interview with Terkel, but much of it is sometimes misattributed to Terkel himself.
Misattributed

Thinking

“He subjected himself in sincerity to the good men whom he visited, and learned thoroughly where each surpassed him in zeal and discipline. He observed the graciousness of one; the unceasing prayer of another; he took knowledge of another's freedom from anger and another's loving-kindness; he gave heed to one as he watched, to another as he studied; one he admired for his endurance, another for his fasting and sleeping on the ground; the meekness of one and the long-suffering of another he watched with care, while he took note of the piety towards Christ and the mutual love which animated all. Thus filled, he returned to his own place of discipline, and henceforth would strive to unite the qualities of each, and was eager to show in himself the virtues of all.”

Athanasius of Alexandria (295–373) Patriarch of Alexandria

§ 4
Life of Anthony of Egypt

Love, Men, Sleep, Study

“The pages of Euclid are like the opening bars of the music of the Grand Opera of Nature's great drama. So to say, they lift the veil and show to our vision a glimpse of a vast world of natural knowledge awaiting study.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern Indian Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

World, Music, Nature, Study

“The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Upanishads–II : Kena and Other Upanishads (2001), p. 355

Effort, Science, Future, Perfection

“The various segments of the system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

“It is true, likewise, that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread throughout the nation, in direct opposition not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not), that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible; and they know, on the other hand, that if but one account of the intercourse of men with separate spirits be admitted, their whole castle in the air (Deism, Atheism, Materialism) falls to the ground. I know no reason, therefore, why we should suffer even this weapon to be wrested out of our hands. Indeed there are numerous arguments besides, which abundantly confute their vain imaginations. But we need not be hooted out of one; neither reason nor religion require this.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Nehemiah Curnock, ed., 'The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M.', London, Charles H. Kelly, vol. 5, p. 265 https://archive.org/stream/a613690405wesluoft#page/265/mode/1up (entry of 25 May 1768) General sources

Men, Age, Religion, Imagination

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

World, Religion, History, Literature

“The older disciplines of Architecture and Manufacturing have accumulated considerable bodies of product knowledge through disciplined management of the "product definition" design artifacts. This has enabled enormous increases in product sophistication and the ability to manage high rates of product change over time. Similarly, disciplined production and management of "Enterprise definition" (i. e. the set of models identified in the Framework for Enterprise Architecture) should provide for an accumulation of a body of Enterprise knowledge to facilitate enormous increases in Enterprise sophistication and accommodation of high rates of Enterprise change over time.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: Concepts of the Framework for Enterprise Architecture, 1993, p. 3

Change, Time

“The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Way, Thinking

“With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

Source: Math for the Layman (1999), Ch. 10, §D

Mathematics, Light

“(referring to phone numbers stored in a database of phone and email records) Since '1' identifies anyone in the regional zone 1 of the world, that's the US, Canada and some of the islands - it's right there in the front of your white pages book … all they have to do is use that as a base of knowledge to go in to their entire database and count all of the phone numbers there that had a one in them, right-and then the ones are in the United States and then they'd have a count of how many Americans are in the database and how often each one's there. And yet they claim they can't do that, which is false. You can do the same thing with email, with service providers, IPs and things like that.”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB3KR8fWNh0

Books, World, Falseness

“Complete knowledge of every theoretical and instrumental detail can only be obtained by those who will devote… a large portion of their lives; but sound knowledge of the principles… can be obtained by the reasonable efforts of persons possessing common opportunities for general knowledge.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Effort, Personality

“Now, it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witness. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 434

Idea, Personality

“Many forms of new knowledge are potentially dangerous, the energy of the atom being a preeminent example. But instead of curtailing inquiry Western societies have in general assumed that the better policy is to continue exploration in confidence that the rewards can be reaped and the risks managed. It is hard to see why exploration of the human genome and its racial variations should be made an exception to this principle, even though researchers and their audience must first develop the words and concepts to discuss a dangerous subject objectively.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Confidence

“To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge - knowledge for leadership of transformation.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

World, Change

“Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:
They show a great respect for experiment and observation,
They don't cherry pick data,
They take a skeptical approach to what they do.
And then scientists work together to get a consensus as to what should be believed
And that generates very reliable knowledge and that reliable knowledge drives innovation”

Paul Nurse (1949) Nobel prize winning British biochemist

Newsnight 30th March 2011 Source: BBC iplayer, 37 mins online http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0101g7l/Newsnight_30_03_2011/

Way, Time

“God hath in truth testified in His Book and so also have testified the company of His angels, His Messengers and those endued with divine knowledge, that thou hast believed in God and in His signs and that everyone is guided aright by virtue of thy guidance. This is indeed a boundless grace which God, the Ever-Living, the Self-Subsisting, hath graciously conferred upon thee aforetime and will confer hereafter. And since thou didst believe in God before the creation, He hath in truth, at His own behest, raised thee up in every Revelation. There is no God but Him, the Sovereign Protector, the All-Glorious.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to the First Letter of the Living

God, Truth, Books, Angels

“It is alone that part of the external universe which we call material which acts on man through his senses — that part of which we ordinarily feel our knowledge to be the surest; but in reality, strangely enough, as will soon appear, this is one of the aspects of the external world, of which we can know nothing.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

Source: Man's Moral Nature (1879), Ch. 1 : Lines of Cleavage

World, Feeling, Reality, Sense

“Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.

God, Universe, Clothes

“The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in "Humanity will survive information deluge — Sir Arthur C Clarke" in OneWorld South Asia (5 December 2003) http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/74591/1 2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Wisdom, Age, Thinking, Sense

“All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), Chapter 12 (p. 182)

Secret

“Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

146
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life, Food, Cars, Communication

“Thus, the founders of grammar were Sîbawayh and, after him, al-Fârisî and Az-Zajjâj. All of them were of non-Arab (Persian) descent. They were brought up in the Arabic language and acquired the knowledge of it through their upbringing and through contact with Arabs. They invented the rules of (grammar) and made it into a discipline (in its own right) for later (generations to use). Most of the ḥadîth scholars who preserved traditions for the Muslims also were Persians, or Persian in language and upbringing, because the discipline was widely cultivated in the 'Irâq and the regions beyond. Furthermore all the scholars who worked in the science of the principles of jurisprudence were Persians. The same applies to speculative theologians and to most Qur'ân commentators. Only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus, the truth of the following statement by the Prophet becomes apparent: 'If scholarship hung suspended in the highest parts of heaven, the Persians would attain it.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, pp. 429-430, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

Truth, Science, Parting

“Ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

15
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Reality

“Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Missing First Page, p. 86.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading, Dead

“We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 25
Essais (1595), Book I

“You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 148

Way, Thinking

“It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction. Ignorance has no light, but error follows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her footsteps, has further to go, before she can arrive at the truth, than ignorance.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; I
Lacon (1820)

Truth, Error, Business, Light

“There's different types of knowledge, and this is where I believe the confusion lies. There's experimental or observational science as we call it. That's using the scientific method: observation, measurement, experiment, testing. That's what produces our technology: computers, spacecraft, jet planes, smoke detectors, looking at DNA, antibiotics, medicines and vaccines. You see, all scientists, whether Creationist or Evolutionist, actually have the same observational or experimental science. It doesn't matter if you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist: you can be a great scientist… But I want us to also understand that molecules-to-man evolution belief has nothing to do with developing technology.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

Understanding, Science

“Leaving virtue without proper cultivation; not thoroughly discussing what is learned; not being able to move towards righteousness of which a knowledge is gained; and not being able to change what is not good: — these are the things which occasion me solicitude.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Learning, Change

“Induction was shown to be untenable as a scientific method by Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Instead, advances in scientific understanding come ideally from hypothetico-deductivism: firstly, development of a hypothesis in relation to a problem situation, and secondly, its testing in relation to all relevant knowledge and furthermore by its great explanatory power.”

John C. Eccles book How the Self Controls Its Brain

How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994)

Understanding, Problem

“Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision. Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

Death, Children, World, Way

“It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

Pg. 246
From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Time, Selfishness

“Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking… Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Letter to the children of Troy, Michigan on the opening of its Public Library (1971), in Why Libraries Matter: Letters to the Children of Troy, Michigan (From 1971) http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/132316, by Lucas Reilly, Mental Floss (3 July 2012)

Books, World, Imagination, History

“We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 1

Life, Fear, Home, Star

“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

Wisdom, Men, Age, Soul

“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 3 (Master Hand)

World, Light, Evil, Change

“Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 9; cited in Daniel J. Power (2004) Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions. p. 23

Thinking, Memory, Help

“Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Closing words
The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Hurt

“Isaac Newton only discovered the law of gravity. He didn’t invent it, did he? In the same way, the Knowledge is within you. I can reveal it. I cannot give it to you from somewhere else. … If somebody comes to me I am sure I can give him the Knowledge and he will be satisfied.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Glastonbury, England Midsummer Festival, June 21, 1971
1970s

Law, Way

“Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end;
Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise,
Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Islanders, l. 55-57.
Other works

Men, Children

“It is quite obvious therefore, that the knowledge and prudence of the poor themselves, are absolutely the only means by which any general and permanent improvement in their condition can be effected. They are really the arbiters of their own destiny; and what others can do for themselves. These truths are so important to the happiness of the great mass of society, that every opportunity should be taken of repeating them.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Chapter V, Of the Profits of Capital, Section III, p. 279
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Happiness, Truth

“To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is … the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Report on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution (c. 1846)

Life

“Not more knowledge but better use of the knowledge which we now have, is perhaps the main educational need and the main educational problem which confronts us.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Education, Problem

“Whatever knowledge of the question is manifested herein comes largely from my work in a variety of movements intended either to diminish the number of dependents or to ameliorate the conditions of poverty.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Poverty (1912), p. vii

Question, Dependency

“Hayek’s view was that all the knowledge that is possible of a circumstance is a theory of the circumstance—that is, there is no such thing as pure sensation. There is, rather, a theory of sensation.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“I taught at a school in Cincinnati with a 0% graduation rate and that was also interesting so I updated from thinking school was beneficial for other people but not beneficial to me, to thinking school was beneficial for maybe some people around the middle – at least some of the better schools – but not beneficial for the vast majority of people, to then actually reading the literature on education and on intelligence and academic accomplishment and symbolic manipulation and concluding "no, school isn't good for anyone". There might be a few schools that are good for people, like there's Blair and there's Stuyvesant and these schools may actually teach people, but school can better be seen as a vaccination program against knowledge than a process for instilling knowledge in people, and of course when a vaccination program messes up, occasionally people get sick and die of the mumps or smallpox or whatever. And when school messes up occasionally people get sick and educated and they lose biological fitness. And in either case the people in charge revise the program and try to make sure that doesn't happen again, but in the case of school they also use that as part of their positive branding and you know maintain a not-very-plausible story about it being intended to cause that effect while also working hard to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

In an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA with Adam Ford, December 2012

People, Education, School, Intelligence

“He who binds
His soul to knowledge, steals the key of heaven.”

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) American magazine writer, editor, and publisher

Willis, The Scholar of Thibét Ben Khorat, II. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

Soul

“The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 660-1

Law, Color, Star, Mathematics

“He came, bringing with Him the knowledge that God is a Being of infinite goodness; that the service required of mankind is not a service of form or ceremony, but a service of obedience.”

James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 62.

God

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious.
That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Mathematics, Nature, Science

“KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING ARE QUITE DIFFERENT. Only understanding can lead to being, whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Source: All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)

Understanding

“A threshold competency is a person's generic knowledge, motive, trait, self image, social role, or skill which is essential to performing a job, but is not causally related to superior job performance.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 23.

Motivation, Personality

“You experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. … Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”

Luke the Evangelist Gospel of Luke

11:46-52 NIV
Gospel of Luke

People, Law, Help

“The natural philosophy of the new developments in the sciences is a systems philosophy. When properly articulated, it can give us both factual and normative knowledge. Exploring such knowledge and applying it in determining our future is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss. For if we do not, another chapter of terrestrial evolution will come to an end, and its unique experiment with rational consciousness will be written off as a failure.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 120.

Failure, Nature, Science, Future

““Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. … This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory—the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit). … Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxvii

Love, Truth, Game

“The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialisation has been that to-day, when there are more "scientists" than ever, there are much less "cultured" men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis. Kant and Mach — the names are mere symbols of the enormous mass of philosophic and psychological thought which has influenced Einstein.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"

Men, World, Effort, Science

“All of this did not take long, because when I argue with myself I always have the uncomfortable knowledge that I’m going to lose; therefore I do it fast to get it over with.”

T. A. Waters (1938–1998) American magician

Source: The Probability Pad (1970), Chapter 7 (p. 56)

“The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly here to trends further ahead. But if this is true of the best-informed, the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgement, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled.”

John Maynard Keynes book A Treatise on Money

A Treatise on Money, Volume II (1930), pp. 360–61

Fear, Hope, Future

“Any organization that deals with a changing environment ought not only to process information efficiently, but also create information and knowledge.”

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist

Nonaka, I. (1994) “A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation”, Organization Science, Vol.5, No.1, February, p. 14. Quoted in: Bratianu (2010).
The Knowledge-creating Company, 1995

Change

“Structure joins the evocative concept of paradigm, a disarmingly simple dialectic of scientific change (long periods of paradigmatic "normal science" punctuated by short "revolutions"), and the apparent authority of historical example to show that major conceptual shifts in the natural sciences are effected not by logical argument alone but also by appeals to worldviews, religion, metaphysical commitments, notions of simplicity and order, and so on. The view that science, like other thought systems, advances or retreats through rhetoric and persuasion, not by logical necessity, was a revelation to people who had never practiced it or studied its history. The book comforted social scientists who wanted to assimilate their discipline to physics, Luddites who blamed social problems on scientists and engineers, and everyone who rejected authority. It repelled the philosophers of science at which it was aimed for the good reason that it undercut their belief that scientific knowledge advances by the application of rational criteria to the products of observation and experiment.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

People, Books, Religion, History

“…I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that's exactly what has happened. It's like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field.”

Josh McDowell (1939) American writer

[Apologist Josh McDowell: Internet the Greatest Threat to Christians, Christian Post, 2011-07-16, Anugrah, Kumar, http://www.christianpost.com/news/apologist-josh-mcdowell-internet-the-greatest-threat-to-christians-52382/, 2011-10-21]