Quotes about knowledge
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“The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions ppear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions… All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual.”

Selman Waksman (1888–1973) American scientist, biochemist, microbiologist who discovered Streptomycin and many antibiotics

As quoted by the Instituto di Microbiologia, (1956). Giornale Di Microbiologia. Volume 2; in proceedings of the First European Symposium on the Biochemistry of Antibiotics

Life, Imagination, Nature, Problem

“As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, … it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Love, Life, Death, Fate

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Address at a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners (29 April 1962), quoted in The White House Diary, at the JFK Library http://www.jfklibrary.org/white%20house%20diary/1962/April/29 1962

Thinking, Housing

“Seek Knowledge and adorn it with forbearance and dignity. Be humble to those whom you teach and to those from whom you learn. Don't be tyrannical in your teaching conduct, for you will forfeit that to which you are entitled to (the reward) on account of it.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī - The Book of the Merits of Knowledge.
Religous Wisdom

Learning

“Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science is Not Enough (1967), Ch. X : The Search for Understanding, p. 191

Men, Faith, Way, Understanding

“I have denied my eyes, both inner and outer. I am not a child, or virgin, or modest wife, fearing to offend. No one owns my eyes now but me. If I have not the stomach by now to look upon any sight in the world, good or evil, beautiful or vile, when shall I? It is far too late for innocence. My only hope is the much more painful consolation of wisdom. Which can grow out of knowledge alone. Give me my true eyes. I want to see. I have to know.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 201

Wisdom, Pain, World, Fear

“Knowledge conceived as an instrument is a means to the end of power. The goal of philosophy, however, is not to gain power over the Absolute but to know it as it truly is.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), p. 4

“Of all possible resources that a firm might posses, its knowledge base has perhaps the greatest ability to serve as a source of sustainable differentiation and hence competitive advantage.”

Vijay Govindarajan (1949) American academic

Anil Kumar Gupta and Vijay Govindarajan. "Knowledge flows within multinational corporations." Strategic management journal 21.4 (2000). p. 473

“This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. By its use the thousand abilities Man has sought to recover become his once more.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

On Scientology in Scientology: A History Of Man (1952).

“Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

8 May 1750
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

People

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Thomas Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld. "Beyond McGregor's theory Y," in: Douglas McGregor (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise; Annotated Edition, 2006, p. 366

People, Nature

“To our unhappy sex genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of Heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison.”

Maria Edgeworth book Leonora

Leonora (1806), Letter 1; Tales and Novels, vol. 13, p. 5.

Sex, Light

“These Thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ’till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, September 1753.
1750s

Communication, Science, Time

“Andrzej Szczeklik was a fascinating personality in many respects. The scope of his general knowledge was absolutely rare. He saw what others did not notice. It's enough to say he was a better doctor than a good doctor. He could look and listen to what the patient says. Looking, he already knew what was wrong, after little things, after grimaces, after the way of breathing, after the way someone sits down or gets up…”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Kobos, Andrzej (2012). Po drogach uczonych. 5. Polska Akademia Umiejętności. pp. 317–335. ISBN 978-83-7676-127-5.

Way, Personality

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) Renaissance mathematician, Polish astronomer, physician

Confucius, as quoted in Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau, Ch. 1
Misattributed

“It may be remarked incidentally that the recognition of the relational character of scientific objects completely eliminates an old metaphysical issue. One of the outstanding problems created by the rise of modern science was due to the fact that scientific definitions and descriptions are framed in terms of which qualities play no part. Qualities were wholly superfluous. As long as the idea persisted (an inheritance from Greek metaphysical science) that the business of knowledge is to penetrate into the inner being of objects, the existence of qualities like colors, sounds, etc., was embarrassing. The usual way of dealing with them is to declare that they are merely subjective, existing only in the consciousness of individual knowers. Given the old idea that the purpose of knowledge (represented at its best in science) is to penetrate into the heart of reality and reveal its "true" nature, the conclusion was a logical one. …The discovery of the nonscientific because of the empirically unverifiable and unnecessary character of absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time gave the final coup de grâce to the traditional idea that solidity, mass, size, etc., are inherent possessions of ultimate individuals.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Color, Way, Idea, Business

“But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Life, History, Perfection

“Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/the_great_desecration.php
The Great Desecration
Pharyngula
2008-07-24

Life, Wisdom, God, Truth

“The light of the people of the world is their knowledge and utterance; while the splendours shed from the glorious acts of Him Whom God shall make manifest are His Words, through whose potency He rolleth up the whole world of existence, sets it under His Own authority by relating it unto Himself, then as the Mouthpiece of God, the Source of His divine light — exalted and glorified be He — proclaimeth: ‘Verily, verily, I am God, no God is there but Me; in truth all others except Me are My creatures. Say, O My creatures! Me alone, therefore, should ye fear’.”

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

VIII, 1
The Persian Bayán

God, People, Truth, World

“The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

God, Heart

“If a friend in Texas seals a silver coin in one envelope and a gold coin in another and mails the envelopes to Tokyo and London, the instant you open you envelope in Japan you know the contents of my envelope in England. But opening your letter causes no physical change in England (faster-than-light or otherwise) but merely involves a change in your knowledge concerning something happening far away and outside your control.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 9, Four Quantum Realities, p. 171 ( See also: Principle of locality)

Light, Change

“A presumption of any fact is, properly, an inferring of that fact from other facts that are known; it is an act of reasoning; and much of human knowledge on all subjects is derived from this source.”

Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden (1762–1832) British barrister and judge, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench

King v. Burdett (1820), 1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 140.

“The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (1957)
20th century, "Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung" (1905)

Imagination, Effort

“Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Understanding, Study, Time, Falseness

“What I am trying to do is to present a unified scientific view of life; that is, a view integrating life's biological, cognitive, and social dimensions. I have had many discussions with social scientists, cognitive scientists, physicists and biologist who question that task, who said that this would not be possible. They ask, why do I believe that I can do that? My belief is based largely on our knowledge of evolution. When you study evolution, you see that there was, first of all, evolution before the appearance of life, there was a molecular type of evolution where structures of greater and greater complexity evolved out of simple molecules. Biochemist who study that have made tremendous progress in understanding that process of molecular evolution. Then we had the appearance of the first cell which was a bacterium. Bacteria evolved for about 2 billion years and in doing so invented, if you want to use the term, or created most of the life processes that we know today. Biochemical processes like fermentation, oxygen breathing, photosynthesis, also rapid motion, were developed by bacteria in evolution. And what happened then was that bacteria combined with one another to produce larger cells — the so-called eukaryotic cells, which have a nucleus, chromosomes, organelles, and so on. This symbiosis that led to new forms is called symbiogenesis.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Capra (2007) in: Francis Pisani " An Interview with Fritjof Capra http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/69/25" in: International Journal of Communication Vol 1 (2007).

Life, Understanding, Question, Study

“Those of us born after that era (of World War II), or with little or no knowledge of those experiences, take freedom for granted. In fact, we give little thought because we are preoccupied with the here and now and yet we owe a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid because you (returned servicemen) paid the price in blood.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Poppy Drive speech, 21 October 2005.

War, World, Freedom, Gratitude

“A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Imagination, Intelligence, Understanding, Passion

“Scientology, the word means study of life, study of knowledge, and that's where it is. It takes up all areas of life itself, things that are integral and maxims that are related to life and very existence. Let me give you an example. It's better if I take that, because it is such a broad-ranging subject covering so many different areas, the subject of communication. This is something that major breakthroughs exist in Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you. And I think everybody would agree that this is an important subject. Well, there's an actual formula for communication which can be understood.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

Scientology Leader Gave ABC First-Ever Interview: David Miscavige, Scientology Leader and Best Man at Tom Cruise's Wedding, Spoke to ABC News' 'Nightline' in 1992, ABC News, November 18, 2006, 2010-07-03 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2664713,.

Life, World, Communication, Thinking

“With respect to those works which, from unscientific design, give way during or immediately after their erection, I shall say little; for with all their evils, they add to our experimental knowledge, and convey a lesson, though a costly one.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Way, Evil

“This is a highly motivated, good country. It is driven by good motives. But it is also a country with an extremely simplistic understanding of world affairs, and with still a high confidence in America’s capacity to prevail, by force if necessary. (…) This is a country of good emotions, but poor knowledge and little sophistication about the world.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Interview in The National Interest - Brzezinski on the Syria Crisis, Interview in The National Interest http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/brzezinski-the-syria-crisis-8636 (June 24, 2013).

World, Confidence, Motivation, Understanding

“Scientific knowledge helps us mainly because it makes the wonder to which we are called by nature rather more intelligible.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Die Wissenschaft hilft uns vor allem, daß sie das Staunen, wozu wir von Natur berufen find.
Maxim 417, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Intelligence, Nature, Help

“One should not label a firm as knowledge-intensive unless exceptional and valuable expertise dominates commonplace knowledge.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: Learning by knowledge‐intensive firms," 1992, p. 716
Context: In deciding whether a firm is knowledge-intensive, one ought to weigh its emphasis on esoteric expertise instead of widely shared knowledge. Everybody has knowledge, most of it widely shared, but some idiosyncratic and personal. If one defines knowledge broadly to encompass what everybody knows, every firm can appear knowledge-intensive. One loses the value of focusing on a special category of firms. Similarly, every firm has some unusual expertise. To make the knowledge-intensive firm a useful category, one has to require that exceptional expertise make important contributions. One should not label a firm as knowledge-intensive unless exceptional and valuable expertise dominates commonplace knowledge.

“Books … hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.”

Isaac Asimov book Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990), pp. 74-75
General sources

Life, Wisdom, People, Books

“I often tell my clients they should do at least 30 percent of all their reading outside their own field. This will give them perspective and knowledge that will make them more interesting.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

You are the Message : Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (1989)

Reading

“We know that they convinced millions that celibacy is the greatest of all virtues—that women are perpetual temptations, the enemies of true holiness—that monks and priests are nobler than fathers, that nuns are purer than mothers. We know that they taught the blessed absurdity of the Trinity—that God once worked at the trade of a carpenter in Palestine. We know that they divided knowledge into sacred and profane—taught that Revelation was sacred—that Reason was blasphemous—that faith was holy and facts false.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Thanksgiving Sermon (1897)

Women, God, Faith, Falseness

“Any cipher can be broken, any code can be compromised. But the most exact academic knowledge of a language gives no clue to its slang, its colloquial allusions, its half statements, over statements, and inverted meanings.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 9 (p. 113)

“Reading, like all work, has its rules. A perfect knowledge of a few writers and a few subjects is more valuable than a superficial one of a great many. The fine points of a piece of writing are seldom apparent at first reading. In youth, one should search among books as one searches the world for friends, and once these friends are found, chosen, and adopted, one must go into retirement with them. Intimacy with Montaigne, Saint Simon, Retz, Balzac, or Proust would be enough to enrich one's whole life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Life, Books, Youth, World

“The causes of Jewish renaissance and pluralism inform much of my work. My goal is to build a Jewish future by working to form a knowledgeable, proud and welcoming Jewish community throughout the world.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

Giving Pledge.

World, Communication, Future

“The possibility of a genuine metatheory of morality is not available. Even psychology has its ethical presuppositions. … A metatheory of morality would be legitimate only if the existence of a hierarchy of absolute, and hence unconditioned, truths were established. They would then provide a framework of supra-ethical categories. The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is to expose just such an exercise … as sleight of hand, an efficacious deception. This critique sets out to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 102

Truth, Exercises

“Sight, when used in the context of nature, creates direct communication with reality. It implies that one is involved in this particular reality and quickly leads a person to action. But when the image has become artificial and is purely a means of knowledge, the reaction persists. I feel directly involved in what I see, just as prehistoric people did. And if I am seeing objects or ideas, I am not truly independent; I cannot really take my distance from these objects. From the intellectual point of view, this means I cannot really exercise my critical faculties. The use of images to transmit knowledge leads to the progressive elimination of distance between a person and his knowledge, because of the way we are made to participate when this means is used (this is, of course, in perfect accord with technical civilization, and to be desired by its standards). The critical faculties and autonomy of the thinking person are also eliminated.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 212
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“Laws creates male dominance, and maintain it, as a social environment. Male dominance is the environment we know, in which we must live. It is our air, water, earth. Laws shape our perceptions and knowledge of what male dominance is, of how it works, of what it means to us. Laws shape the experiences the experiences we have before we have them Laws significantly predetermine how we will feel, will understand, what will happen to us in life. Laws establish or humans the terms of our symbiosis with male dominance: what it takes from us to sustain itself as an overall environmental system.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter Eight

Life, Law, Feeling, Understanding

“This will of Stirner’s, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, …”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 107

Understanding, Question

“To follow the path of knowledge is to tread on the edge of a sword.
Once you get into it, there is no escape.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas's practical approach, quoted in "Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern", p. 80

“Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. … The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 11

Wisdom, Truth, Question, Universe

“The view we enjoyed from the summit [of Mount Rainier] could hardly be surpassed in sublimity and grandeur; but one feels far from home so high in the sky, so much so that one is inclined to guess that, apart from the acquisition of knowledge and the exhilaration of climbing, more pleasure is to be found at the foot of the mountains than on their tops. Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"Washington and the Puget Sound" in Picturesque California (1888-1890); reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 20
1880s

Happiness, Pleasure, Feeling, Home

“Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 2 : Science and Hope, p. 28

Religion, Hope, History, Understanding

“The standard process of organizing knowledge into departments, and subderpartments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Time

“One of the nastiest aspects of the 'no-fly list' — and believe it or not, its authors are proud of this part — is that you can't find out whether you're on it until you've paid for your ticket and are standing in line to get your boarding pass. Denied the service that you paid for, to my knowledge there is no way to get your money back. Nor is there any way to find out why you're on the list, or how you can get off. It is known that civil rights advocates of various kinds have been placed on the list, apparently because they're civil rights advocates.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"It Has to Cost Them Something".

Money, Way, Parting, Flying

“The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors.”

Glenn Greenwald (1967) American journalist, lawyer and writer

"France's censorship demands to Twitter are more dangerous than 'hate speech'" in The Guardian, 2 January 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/02/free-speech-twitter-france

Error, History

“It has often occurred to my mind in digesting my thoughts on this subject, what a pity it is that this most useful science should be so generally neglected in the modern methods of education; and that preceptors and tutors, both in public and private seminaries of learning, should forget that the forming the manners is more necessary to a finished education than furnishing the minds of youth. Socrates, who made all his philosophy subservient to morality, was of this sentiment: and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy.”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Men, Pain, Youth, Education

“Jazz music is a lifestyle. It’s not notes, chords and arpeggios. Today’s improvisation is too based on the knowledge of chords and the way they practice the chords. It’s not a melodic thing anymore like the older days. It was much more important to play shorter and to play more variable, valid stuff. Today, a lot of solos are long and uninteresting and the influence usually comes from John Coltrane’s group. He himself was a master musician, but he put so much emphasis on chord knowledge and technique, and now the kids want to show how fast they can play. This is the same with piano players and most instrumentalists—it’s speed. That’s gonna change again and hopefully the kids who are now 16 and 17 years old have a little more sense and maybe some more stories to tell.”

Joe Zawinul (1932–2007) austrian composer and pianist

Reflecting on the new generation's take on jazz music
Prasad interview (1997)

Music, Way, Sense, Change

“The question is, whether, like the Divine Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming wise to God.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 617.

Life, Wisdom, God, Law

“It is said that when Veda Vyasa conceived the Mahabharata in his mind he knew that it would be a very large work and that he would need a stenographer to take dictation…. Lord Brahma appeared and told him to invoke Lord Ganesha, the god of knowledge, who would assist Vyasa in his work.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

Swami Tejomayananada, in p. 139.
Sources, Hindu Culture, An Introduction

God, Appearance

“[But] to sing of your face, a composition
in itself sublime and marvelous,
I lack knowledge, Lady, and wit and art.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Porém, pera cantar de vosso gesto
A composição alta e milagrosa
Aqui falta saber, engenho e arte.
The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes (2016), trans. Landeg White, p. 25
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Eu cantarei de amor tão docemente

Art, Singing

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way

“When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"Perfect Knowledge in Final Things" (p. 110)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Perfection

“Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness… It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1948) "Samuelson's Foundations: The Role of Mathematics in Economics," In: Journal of Political Economy, Vol 56 (June). as cited in: Peter J. Boettke (1998) " James M. Buchanan and the Rebirth of Political Economy http://publicchoice.info/Buchanan/files/boettke.htm". Boettke further explains "Boulding's words are even more telling today than they were then as we have seen the fruits of the formalist revolution in economic theory and how it has cut economics off from the social theoretic discourse on the human condition." 1940s

Mathematics, Perfection

“We’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"A Dark Age of Macroeconomics" http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/a-dark-age-of-macroeconomics-wonkish/, 27 January 2009 The Conscience of a Liberal blog

Age

“Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.”

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

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Sense

“This is the truth of the matter. In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in his knowledge far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses. Yet this misrelation is of little concern to us. On the contrary, we set a high price on knowledge, and everyone strives for this knowledge more and more. "But," says the sensible person, "one must be careful about the direction one's knowing takes. If my knowing turns inward, against me, if I do not take care to prevent this, then knowing is the most intoxicating thing there is, the way to become completely intoxicated, since there then occurs an intoxicating confusion between the knowledge and the knower, so that the knower himself will resemble, will be, that which is known. If your knowing takes such a turn and you yield to it, it will soon end with your tumbling like a drunk man into actuality, plunging yourself recklessly into drunken action without giving the understanding and sagacity the time to take into proper consideration what is prudent, what is advantageous, what will pay. This is why we, the sober ones, warn you, not against knowing or against expanding your knowledge, but against letting your knowledge take an inward direction, for then it is intoxicating." This is thieves' jargon. It says that it is one's knowledge that, by taking the inward direction in this way, intoxicates, rather than that in precisely this way it makes manifest that one is intoxicated, intoxicated in one's attachment to this earthly life, the temporal, the secular, and the selfish. And this is what one fears, fears that one's knowing, turned inward, toward oneself, will expose the intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will make it impossible for one to slip back into that adored state, into intoxication. p. 118”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)

Life, Truth, Fear, Way

“All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the well-tested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of the metropolitan police.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

describing the pragmatist view, p. 49.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

Nature, Problem

“If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 128-129
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses (1843-1844)

Pain, Truth, Education, Imagination

“What these thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who … does not predicate the capture of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it, as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his discoveries to others.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 148

Study, Joy

“It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God’s nature and works become silent when asked about God’s methods.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 149

God, Nature

“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 713, B 741
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Mathematics

“The social sciences building at the University of Chicago indeed still bears since it was built 40 years ago on its outside an inscription taken from the famous physicist Lord Kelvin: "When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." I will admit that that may be true, but it is certainly not scientific to insist on measurement where you don't know what your measurements mean. There are cases where measurements are not relevant. What has done much damage to microeconomics is striving for a pseudo-exactness by imitating methods of the physical sciences which have to deal with what are fundamentally much more simple phenomena. And the assumption that it is possible to ascertain all the relevant particular facts still completely dominates the alternative methods of dealing with our constitutional ignorance, which economists have tried to overcome. This of course, is what has come to be called macroeconomics as distinct from microeconomics.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance"

Universe, Science

“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Science

“Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 382)

“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet

Beauty, Soul, Learning, Personality

“"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Three

Love, Life, Hate, Hostility

“I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

People, World, Thinking, Reality

“On behalf of the British people I salute the skill and courage which have brought man to the moon. May this endeavour increase the knowledge and well-being of mankind.”

Isabel II do Reino Unido (1926–2022) queen of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and head of the Commonwealth of Nations

Message left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 11; NASA documentation http://history.nasa.gov/ap11-35ann/goodwill/Apollo_11_material.pdf#page=34 (13 July 1969)

People, Courage

“Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 295

People, Thinking, Memory

“Where does Guru Maharaj Ji fit in? Guru Maharaj Ji doesn't fit in anywhere. Guru Maharaj Ji is Knowledge. It is Guru Maharaj Ji's Knowledge. … Who are you going to do service to, for? Guru Maharaj Ji. What are you going to meditate on? The Holy Name, which is Guru Maharaj Ji.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Holi Festival, Miami, Florida, USA, April 8, 1979. Published in the 'Divine Times', May/June 1979 edition, Volume 8, Number 3, Page 16.
1970s

“Before that kafir [Guru Arjun Deva] was executed this recluse [meaning himself] had seen in a dream that the reigning king had smashed the skull of idolatry. Indeed, he was a great idolater, and the leader of the idolaters, and the chief of unbelievers. May Allah blast him! The Holy Prophet who is the ruler of religion as well as the world, has cursed the idolaters as follows in some of his prayers – “O Allah, demean their society, create divisions in their ranks, destroy their homes, and get at them like the mighty one.”
It is required by religion [Islam] that jihad should be waged against the unbelievers, and that they should be dealt with harshly… It is obligatory on Muslims to acquaint the king of Islam with the evil customs of false religions… Maybe the king has no knowledge of these evil customs… Some Ulama of Islam should come forward, and proclaim the evils present in their (unbelievers’) ways… It will be no excuse on the Day of Judgment that they did not proclaim the tenets of the Shariat because they were not called upon (to do so)…”

Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) Indian philosopher

Maktubat-i-Imam Rabbani translated into Urdu by Maulana Muhammad Sa’id Ahmad Naqshbandi, Deoband, 1988, Volume I, pp.435-36. This letter was written to Shaikh Farid.
From his letters

World, Religion, Dreams, Way

“It is at any rate evident, that a large and ample province remains for the exercise of Providence, without its being naturally perceptible by us; because obscurity, when applied to the interruption of laws, bears a necessary proportion to the imperfection of our knowledge when applied to the laws themselves, or rather to the effects which these laws, under their various and incalculable combinations, would of their own accord produce. And if it be said, that the doctrine of Divine Providence, by reason of the ambiguity under which its exertions present themselves, can be attended with no practical influenceupon our conduct; that, although we believe ever so firmly that there is a Providence, we must prepare, and provide, and act, as if there were none; I answer, that this is admitted: and that we further allege, that so to prepare, and so to provide, is consistent with the most perfect assurance of the reality of a Providence; and not only so, but that it is probably one advantage of the present state of our information, that our provisions and preparations are not disturbed by it. Or if it be still asked, Of what use at all then is the doctrine, if it neither alter our measures nor regulate our conduct? I answer again, that it is of the greatest use, but that it is a doctrine of sentiment and piety, not (immediately at least) of action or conduct; that it applies to the consolation of men's minds, to their devotions, to the excitement of gratitude, the support of patience, the keeping alive and the strengthening of every motive for endeavouring to please our Maker; and that these are great uses.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 26 : The Goodness of the Deity.

Men, Law, Exercises, Motivation

“Their lordships had some experience in that House two years ago, when restrictive laws were passed and when the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended…The effect of these measures was, in his opinion, the cause of a great portion of the discontent which now prevailed. After all the experience which they had had, there was no attempt at conciliation, no concession to the people; nothing was alluded to but a resort to coercion…The natural consequence of such a system, when once begun, was that it could not be stopped: discontents begot the necessity of force; the employment of force increased discontents: these would demand the exercise of new powers, till by degrees they would depart from all the principles of the constitution…Could government rest with confidence upon the sword for security? It was impossible that a government of such a nature could exist in England…without that spirit which the knowledge of the advantages they enjoyed under their constitution infused, all their energies would flag, and all their feelings by which their glory as a nation had been established, would be utterly dissipated.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Lords (23 November 1819). Parliamentary Debates, vol. xli, pp. 7-19, quoted in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (ed.), The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 5-6.
1810s

People, Law, Feeling, Exercises

“Some signs of understanding are: clemency, knowledge, and silence. Silence is one of the doors to wisdom. It brings about love and is evidence for all good.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī, vol.2, p. 124.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Love, Wisdom, Understanding, Silence

“There's actually a network that I could think of that [does not ask difficult questions] for a living, which is tell the people at home the same answer all the time, because it makes them feel good. And they don't like hearing arguments on that network, the people that watch it. There are people out there that — there was a great scene at the end of Carnal Knowledge — remember that old movie — where Jack Nicholson is going to the hooker, and he wants it exactly the same every time. And when she— when Rita Moreno, who played the hooker, said something just a little bit different in their normal sort of business they did, and he couldn't do it. They want it exactly the same way, these people who watch Fox. Every night they want it the same way. They can't do it if it's not exactly the same way.”

Chris Matthews (1945) American news anchor

Real Time with Bill Maher, 27 August 2004; regarding the Fox News Channel

People, Way, Feeling, Home

“Humans… entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires…. People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 188

People, World, Law, Art

“English: Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. It taught me many things, and I am greatly indebted to it. Geophysical evidence reveals the power of the stars and the planets in relation to the terrestrial. In turn, astrology reinforces this power to some extent. This is why astrology is like a life-giving elixir to mankind.”

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

Die Astrologie ist eine Wissenschaft für sich. Aber eine wegweisende. Ich habe viel aus ihr gelernt und vielen Nutzen aus ihr ziehen können. Die physikalischen Erkenntnisse unterstreichen die Macht der Sterne über irdisches Geschick. Die Astrologie aber unterstreicht in gewissem Sinne wiederum die physikalischen Erkenntnisse. Deshalb ist sie eine Art Lebens-elixier für die Gesellschaft!
German quote attributed to Einstein in Huters astrologischer Kalender 1960 [A]
Translated by Tad Mann, unidentified 1987 work
Contradicted by Denis Hamel, The End of the Einstein-Astrology-Supporter Hoax, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2007), pp. 39-43
Alice Calaprice, The Expanded Quotable Einstein: "Attributed to Einstein […] An excellent example of a quotation someone made up and attributed to Einstein in order to lend an idea credibility."
Misattributed

Life, Star, Science

“In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies (1906), p. 444

Life, Death, Error, Reality

“The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Speech to the Lotus Club (16 November 1912).

“The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

No. 68.
Aphorisms (1930)

“Thus the world of minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and standard Objects, becomes at one and the same stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and of good-will alike: to refuse good-will is to violate the primary principle of each mind's own existence, and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of indifference or of ill-will.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Preface to Second Edition, p.xxxvii

World, Indifference

“Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.”

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) English historian

" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)

Idea

“We disagree about who should be Americanized. The immigrant, working in some of the industries, and set apart from American life, thinks the native-born needs it most; the American, visiting the crowded quarters of his city, thinks the immigrant needs it more; and there is as yet no common meeting ground of men's minds upon whom to Americanize and especially upon how to go about it. Despite the great contributive value of the Liberty Loan, the Red Cross, the war camp communities, the Councils of Defense, and other activities that are helping to unite the many peoples, the fusion of a youthful race with those wise races of the old world, which have withstood many an enthusiasm and many a peril, cannot be achieved by a popular movement or by sporadic specialized campaigns. Without specific knowledge of points of differentiation and without sympathetic points of contact, anything like real fusion becomes impossible.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Men, War, People

“That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"
Collected Poems (1954)

Reality, Sun, Parting, Cry

“It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 2 : Diderot : The Talker, p. 61

Life, Books, Soul

“Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known.”

Anthony Kenny (1931) British philosopher

What I Believe (2006), p. 14
Source: https://books.google.com/books/about/What_I_Believe.html?id=bQnZcFiCz8QC&pg=PA14 What I Believe

Understanding

“[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Paul J. DiMaggio (1997). "Culture and Cognition." Annual Review of Sociology, 23: p. 269.

“Every employee in an undertaking — workman, foreman, shop manager, head of division, head of department, manager, and if it is a state enterprise the series extends to the minister or head of a state department — takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. By administrative knowledge we mean planning, organization, command, coordination, and control: it can be elementary for the workman, but must be very wide in the case of employees of high rank, especially managers of big concerns. Everyone has some need of administrative knowledge.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 10; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 4-5

“I grew up in a world, [a] very New Jersey, American, Dominican, immigrant, African-American, Latino world. And, you know, I went to school and it was basically the same. I went to college; it was basically the same, where largely I wasn't really encouraged to imagine women as fully human. I was in fact pretty much — by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV — encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men. And so I think that a lot of guys, part of our journey is wrestling with, coming to face, our limited imagina[tion] and growing in a way that allows us not only to imagine women as fully human, but to imagine the things that we do to women — that we often do blithely, without thinking, we just sort of shrug off — as actually deeply troubling and as hurting another human being. And this seems like the simplest thing. A lot of people are like, 'Really, that's like a huge leap of knowledge, of the imagination?”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

But for a lot of guys, that is. NPR interview (September 2012) http://www.npr.org/2012/09/11/160252399/fidelity-in-fiction-junot-diaz-deconstructs-a-cheater

Women, Men, People, World

“Buddhism does not demand blind faith from its adherents. Here mere belief is dethroned and is substituted by confidence based on knowledge, which, in Pali, is known as Saddha. The confidence placed by a follower on the Buddha is like that of a sick person in a noted physician, or a student in his teacher.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Faith, Confidence, Teachers, Personality

“Much has been said of late about world ideals. But I prefer to think of the ideal for America. I like to think there's something more than the patriotism and practical wisdom of the founding fathers. It's good to believe that maybe destiny held this New World republic to be the supreme example of representative democracy and orderly liberty by which humanity is inspired to higher achievement. It is idle to think we have attained perfection, but there is the satisfying knowledge that we hold orderly processes for making our government reflect the heart and mind of the Republic.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1920s, The American Soldier (1920)

Wisdom, World, Democracy, Thinking

“Summing up, Nanoscale Communication Networks is a demanding but also very interesting book, an ambitious primer. It is definitely a good starting point for further reading. The author guides the reader through all the aspects of nanonetworks, giving in most cases a clear description of his thinking process within transitions between equations. There are also many cross references between chapters and sections which give a broader view of the topic and help to memorize it. One can also find many pictures, diagrams and tables throughout this book in order to systematize the presented knowledge.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Communication, Thinking, Reading

“Truth existed before the world began and will still be persisting until long after the world ends, so therefore "source of truth" really has no bearing on anything. What is important is the discovery of truth and its application. That is, to what purpose is the truth put, to what goals it is used for, the method in which the truth is applied, to what benefit the truth is used, that is, who benefits by its use or its non-use or its being hidden or exposed. Such things as truth, facts, knowledge and discoveries, and techniques, are tools, and they in themselves don't have the ability to create or cause any action, effect or result. It is what people do with them that is important. It's the Being behind the tool. A scalpel can cut your throat or it can repair a body. A hammer can bash somebody's brains out or build a house. Therefore, what's more important is the individual's intention and action with that tool, not the tool itself.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Taped Message (1984)

People, Truth, World, Housing

“If we want to improve the world we cannot do it with scientific knowledge but with ideals. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Gandhi have done more for humanity than science has done. We must begin with the heart of man—with his conscience—and the values of conscience can only be manifested by selfless service to mankind. In this respect, I feel that the Churches have much guilt. She has always allied herself with those who rule, who have political power, and more often than not, at the expense of peace and humanity as a whole.”

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

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 92

World, Peace, Feeling, Science