Quotes about knowledge
page 33

“To investigate the essence of a natural phenomenon, three conditions are necessary: We must first study and know the phenomenon itself, from all sides; we must then determine in what relation it stands to other natural phenomena; and lastly, when we have ascertained all these relations, we have to solve the problem of measuring these relations and the laws of mutual dependence—that is, of expressing them in numbers. In the first period of chemistry, all the powers of men's minds were devoted to acquiring a knowledge of the properties of bodies; it was necessary to discover, observe, and ascertain their peculiarities. This is the alchemistical period. The second period embraces the determination of the mutual relations or connections of these properties; this is the period of phlogistic chemistry. In the third period, in which we now are, we ascertain by weight and measure and express in numbers the degree in which the properties of bodies are mutually dependent. The inductive sciences begin with the substance itself, then come just ideas, and lastly, mathematics are called in, and with the aid of numbers, complete the work.”

Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) German chemist

Familiar Letters on Chemistry, Tr. Blythe, 4th ed., London, 1859, p. 60 as quoted by John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903).

Men, Law, Mathematics, Idea

“What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power. In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Fashion, Rage, Help

“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.””

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-1, "Introduction"; p. 1-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Truth, Law, Nature, Learning

“At last, here is a new man [ Millet ], who has the knowledge which I would like to have, and movement, color, expression, too, - here is a painter!”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Quote of Diaz, 1844; as cited by fr:Alfred Sensier, in Jean-Francois Millet – Peasant and Painter, translated from the French original by Helena de Kay; publ. Macmillan and Co., London, 1881, p. 62
Diaz de la Peña gave this comment when he saw for the first time work of Millet: the painting 'The Riding Lessons' on the Paris' Salon of 1844
Quotes of Diaz

Color

“So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit.
All of them were Russian.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Scouting

“In our time of ever-increasing specialization, there is a tendency to concern ourselves with relatively narrow scientific problems. The broad foundations of our present-day scientific knowledge and its historical development tend to be forgotten too often. This is an unfortunate trend, not only because our horizon becomes rather limited and our perspective somewhat distorted, but also because there are many valuable lessons to be learned in looking back over the years during which the basic concepts and the fundamental laws of a particular scientific discipline were first formulated.”

Emil Wolf

in Einstein's Researches on the Nature of Light, [Emil Wolf, Selected works of Emil Wolf: with commentary, World Scientific, 2001, 9810242042, 536]

Law, Problem, Learning, Time

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 91

Religion, Idea, Science

“I signaled to my host to try to have the philosophers expound on some aspect of their knowledge. As a good friend he immediately rose to the occasion. I won't go into the conversation that accompanied his request, and the difference between the comic and the serious was too slight to translate.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

“When a great politician dies, or any man who has filled a large space in the public mind, and made a noise in the world, the newspapers long ring with the event. But it is otherwise with the great thinker, the mathematician or the philosopher, who has laboured silently and in comparative seclusion, to extend the boundaries of human knowledge. When such a man is removed by death there are public journals, even among those professedly devoted to literature and science, which can dismiss the event with a few faint and cold remarks.* But time rectifies all that. It is found sooner or later that no reputation, however brilliant, is permanent or durable which does not rest on useful discoveries and real contributions to our knowledge.”

Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897) English journalist

R.H. Hutton, "Professor Boole," in: The British Quarterly Review http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA165. (1866), p. 141

Death, World, Literature, Science

“Isaac Newton deserves to be included in a series of companions to major philosophers even though he was not a philosopher in the sense in which Descartes, Locke, and Kant were philosophers. That is, Newton made no direct contributions to epistemology or metaphysics that would warrant his inclusion in the standard list of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant – or even in a list of other significant philosophers of the era – Bacon, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Wolff, and Reid. The contributions to knowledge that made Newton a dominant figure of the last millennium were to science, not to philosophy.”

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

Source: The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2002, p. 1

Sense, Science

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Men, World

“Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

World, Way

“Such was the man who was sent on an embassy to Ajmir, in order that the Rai (Pithaura) of that country might see the right way without the intervention of the sword, and that he might incline from the track of opposition into the path of propriety, leaving his airy follies for the institutes of the knowledge of Allah, and acknowledging the expediency of uttering the words of martyrdom and repeating the precepts of the law, and might abstain from infidelity and darkness, which entails the loss of this world and that to come, and might place in his ear the ring of slavery to the sublime Court (may Allah exalt it!) which is the centre of justice and mercy, and the pivot of the Sultans of the worldand by these means and modes might cleanse the fords of good life from the sins of impurity'…'The army of Islam was completely victorious, and 'an hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell'… After this great victory, the army of Islam marched forward to Ajmir, where it arrived at a fortunate moment and under an auspicious bird, and obtained so much booty and wealth, that you might have said that the secret depositories of the seas and hills had been revealed….'While the Sultan remained at Ajmir, he destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the conquest of Ajmer (Rajasthan) Hasan Nizami: Taju’l-Ma’sir, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 213-216. Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

Life, Secret, World, Justice

“People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn on our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which ‘primitive’ peoples don’t have because they don’t need them.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 2 : ‘Primitive’ Thinking and the ‘Civilized’ Mind

People, Training

“The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and sub-title, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 1 (1999; 13)

Books, Reality

“Wadewitz was an educator who did not live to make money from her knowledge. Instead, she chose to spread her knowledge as freely as possible for the good of readers everywhere.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Brandt, Shane (April 22, 2014). "Wikipedia editor dies, leaving behind appreciative students" http://thedailycougar.com/2014/04/22/wikipedia-editor-dies-leaving-behind-appreciative-students/. The Daily Cougar (Houston, Texas: thedailycougar.com; University of Houston). About

Money, Education

“It will be enough, for our purposes, to define 'reality' as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away'), and to define 'knowledge' as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 1 (1999; 13)

Reality

“It [angling] deserves commendations;… it is an art worthy the knowledge and practice of a wise man.”

Izaak Walton book The Compleat Angler

Part I, ch. 1.
The Compleat Angler (1653-1655)

Art

“A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

Toys and the Playful World http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/WIT.html

Children, World, Imagination, Time

“People have finally realized that human knowledge can never grow unless all opinions are respected. it’s the only way for them to interact in a crucial environment for new ideas to be born”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

People, Way, Idea

“All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought.”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

“The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things began and arriving from these origins at a knowledge of their nature, is certainly perfectly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know about the world, and everything would be plunged into confusion.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 55.
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903

World, Nature, Time

“Although Tolstoy in his protest recognized the fact that he was bound up with all others, neither this nor the knowledge of his individual helplessness induced him to work with others in order to change any part of the infamous governmental system of Russia.”

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

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 67

Change, Parting

“The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

Men, Truth

“Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text for a repetition of the combination B-O-Y. Presently he found it beneath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went upon four legs like the jackal and resembled him not a little. Beneath this picture the bugs appeared as: A BOY AND A DOG There they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied the little ape.
And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it — a task which might seem to you or me impossible — learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.
He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 7 : The Light of Knowledge

Books, Dogs, Boy, Idea

“The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe.”

Ian McDonald book River of Gods

Source: River of Gods (2006), Ch. 9 (p. 93).

Life, Law, Light, Universe

“Neural computing is the study of cellular networks that have a natural property for storing experimental knowledge. Such systems bear a resemblance to the brain in the sense that knowledge is acquired through training rather than programming and is retained due to changes in node functions. The knowledge takes the form of stable states or cycles of states in the operation of the et. A central property of such nets is to recall these states or cycles in response to the presentation of cues.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Aleksander & Morton (1989) Neural computing architectures: the design of brain-like machines. p.2 as cited in: M.A. Lovell et al. (1997) Developments in petrophysics. p.169

Nature, Sense, Study, Change

“Positivism : knowledge is hard, real, and capable of being transmitted in a tangible form.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 247.

“Activism on behalf of the ways of Chassidus means that even when a chassid is in the marketplace, deeply involved in his business, he still thinks about what he can do for chassidic concerns and the welfare of chassidim…. Activism on behalf of the ways of Chassidus is a personal obligation, regardless whether one is great or limited in knowledge of Chassidus.”

Menachem Mendel Schneerson book Hayom Yom

From Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, "21 Av," Hayom Yom, Kehot Publication Society, 1942.

Way, Business, Thinking, Personality

“The problem of transmitting scientific knowledge is a very difficult business.”

Jack Steinberger (1921) Swiss physicist

Interview with the 1988 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Jack Steinberger, at the 58th Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, July 2008.

Business, Problem

“A plane is not necessarily a planet. A plane may be one planet, but a plane may also exist where no planet is. One planet may have several planes. Planes may also involve various aspects of apparent time. Planes can and do intermix without the knowledge of the inhabitants. A plane may be a time... or only one iota of vitality that exists all by itself. A plane may cease to be. A plane is formed for entities as patterns for fulfillment along various lines. It is a climate conducive to the development of unique and particular capabilities and achievements... an isolation of elements.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 103-104, quoting from Seth Session 16

Time

“There is no doubt that Sankara before him had set the wheel of inquiry by boldly declaring Advaita as the answers to all the questions posed by different Upanishads. He has tried to synthesize the approach and took up the Brahma sutras of Vyasa as the basic text for study. The Brahma sutras is an extraordinary text. Before Sage Vyasa a very great body of literature has accumulated mainly in the Upanishads, most of the time speaking in one voice about Brahama vidya and at the same time throwing in diverse suggestions It has grown up almost like a banyan tree with overgrown branches. Vyasa by reducing many of these concepts into short and crisp sutras has provided behind each sutra an ocean of knowledge. It is impossible to understand the whole body of knowledge in a unitary way. Sankara brought in a cohesion. He was close to the Vedic ideals in point of time …”

R. Nagaswamy (1930) Indian academic

"Ramanuja Myth & Reality A Critical Study Of Ramanujas Life & Works

Way, Literature, Understanding, Question

“Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"The Nightingale of Keats"
Other Inquisitions (1952)

Men, Error, Feeling, Reality

“I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its own motions; especially so as to make them conformable to laws that it has no knowledge of.”

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature" Sect.1 ibid.

Law, Understanding, Sense

“And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, — nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

Essay "Analogies in Nature" (February 1856), reprinted in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862 edited by P.M. Harman, p. 376 (the quote appears on p. 383 http://books.google.com/books?id=zfM8AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA383#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Law, Mathematics

“And therefore I think you have done very wisely to make it your business to consider the Phœnomena relating to the present question, which have been afforded by experiments, especially since it might seem injurious to our senses, by whose mediation we acquire so much of the knowledge we have of things corporal, to have recourse to far-fetched and abstracted Ratiocination, to know what are the sensible ingredients of those sensible things that we daily see and handle, and are supposed to have the liberty to untwist (if I may so speak) into the primitive bodies they consist of.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Physiological Considerations Part of the First Dialogue (15)
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

Question, Business, Thinking, Sense

“Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question:
Where was "here"?
He shut that one down sharply.
Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize your knowledge.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Outside

Outside (1955)

Way, Feeling, Question, Time

“For ourselves, we firmly believe that the finger of Providence is pointing the way to all races, and colors, and nations, along the path that is to lead the east and the west alike to the great goal of human wants. Demons infest that path, and numerous and unhappy are the wanderings of millions who stray from its course; sometimes in reluctance to proceed; sometimes in an indiscreet haste to move faster than their fellows, and always in a forgetfulness of the great rules of conduct that have been handed down from above. Nevertheless, the main course is onward; and the day, in the sense of time, is not distant, when the whole earth is to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, "as the waters cover the sea.
One of the great stumbling-blocks with a large class of well-meaning, but narrow-judging moralists, are the seeming wrongs that are permitted by Providence, in its control of human events. Such persons take a one-sided view of things, and reduce all principles to the level of their own understandings. If we could comprehend the relations which the Deity bears to us, as well as we can comprehend the relations we bear to him, there might be a little seeming reason in these doubts; but when one of the parties in this mighty scheme of action is a profound mystery to the other, it is worse than idle, it is profane, to attempt to explain those things which our minds are not yet sufficiently cleared from the dross of earth to understand.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Preface
Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848)

Color, Way, Understanding, Sense

“Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical difficulty in education which a mere student could never overcome; a difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience, but in the sheer chaos of human nature.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Nature, Appearance

“The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Preface
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

World, Imagination, Help, Perfection

“Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Idea, Science, Time

“Gurdjieff said, “Change depends on you, and it will not come about through study. You can know everything and yet remain where you are. It is like a man who knows all about money and the laws of banking, but has no money of his own in the bank. What does all his knowledge do for him?”

Here Gurdjieff suddenly changed his manner of speaking, and looking at me very directly he said: “You have the possibility of changing, but I must warn you that it will not be easy. You are still full of the idea that you can do what you like. In spite of all your study of free will and determinism, you have not yet understood that so long as you remain in this place, you can do nothing at all. Within this sphere there is no freedom. Neither your knowledge nor all your activity will give you freedom. This is because you have no …” Gurdjieff found it difficult to express what he wanted in Turkish. He used the word varlik, which means roughly the quality of being present. I thought he was referring to the experience of being separated from one’s body.

Neither I nor the Prince [Sabaheddin] could understand what Gurdjieff wished to convey. I felt sad, because his manner of speaking left me in no doubt that he was telling me something of great importance. I answered, rather lamely, that I knew that knowledge was not enough, but what else was there to do but study?…”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Source: Witness: the Story of a Search (1962), p. 46–48 cited in: "Gurdjieff’s Temple Dances by John G. Bennett", Gurdjieff International Review, on gurdjieff.org; About Constantinople 1920

Money, Sadness, Law, Idea

“In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Quote from the review 'Nord-Sud', December 1917
a remark of Braque's writings, he wrote during his long convalescence in the hospital, after he was seriously wounded in World War 1, in 1915
1908 - 1920

Art

“On Another Country "You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!" - that is to say, Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance, that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history, like the Christian believer who does not believe in Christ because he has been convinced by theological arguments but, on the contrary, is susceptible to theological arguments because he is already illuminated by the grace of belief.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

41
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Truth, History, Understanding, Christ

“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Error

“As I was a stranger to all the lower country, I thought it absolutely necessary for me to come for ward. A thorough knowledge of the country is not easily obtained; such a one, at least, as is necessary to fix upon the most eligible position for forming a camp. The security of the army, the ease and convenience of the troops, as well as to perform the du ties of my office with a degree of reputation, all conspired to make me wish to fix upon the properest ground for the purpose. This it was impossible for me to do, unless I came on before the troops. And I must confess I saw no objection, as your Excellency had wrote me nothing to the contrary, and what I wrote naturally led to such a measure.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1778)

Nature, Country

“Undoubtedly it is our duty, and for our best good, that we occupy and improve the faculties, with which our creator has endowed us, but so far as prejudice, or prepossession of opinion prevails over our minds, in the same proportion, reason is excluded from our theory or practice. Therefore if we would acquire useful knowledge, we must first divest ourselves of those impediments and sincerely endeavor to search out the truth: and draw our conclusions from reason and just argument, which will never conform to our inclination, interest or fancy but we must conform to that if we would judge rightly.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. XIII Section II - Of The Importance of the Exercise of Reason, and Practice of Morality, in order to the Happiness of Mankind

Truth, Search, Drawing, Sincerity

“The secret of success lies in investing into education, as the wealthy countries do. This means not in technology and machines first. That would come later, with educated and qualified individuals. Considering that we are lagging behind reforms, the only way to make up for such gap is to have a non-linear development by making leaps, all of which would be have an education as a base. Education, training, knowledge, are the major driving forces of progress.”

Zoran Đinđić (1952–2003) Serbian politician

From Zoran Djindjic's speech at press conference From vision to defined program, 15.01.2002.

Secret, Education, Way, Success

“The architect should also have a knowledge of the study of medicine on account of the questions of climates, air, the healthiness and unhealthiness of sites, and the use of different waters. For without these considerations the healthiness of a dwelling cannot be assured.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 10

Question, Study, Water

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication, Literature, Sense

“Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe… I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us. …After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Letter to Benjamin Franklin (Feb 2, 1790) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985)

Departure, Science, Parting

“Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge.”

Larry Samuelson (1953) American economist

Larry Samuelson. Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection. 1997. Overview.

People, Error, Game, Learning

“There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Source: Poetry and Craft (1965), p. 95

Wisdom

“If the physician clearly perceives what is to be cured in diseases, that is to say, in every individual case of disease (knowledge of disease, indication), if he clearly perceives what is curative in medicines, that is to say, in each individual medicine (knowledge of medical powers), and if he knows how to adapt, according to clearly defined principles, what is curative in medicines to what he has discovered to be undoubtedly morbid in the patient, so that the recovery must ensue - to adapt it, as well in respect to the suitability of the medicine most appropriate according to its mode of action to the case before him (choice of the remedy, the medicine indicated), as also in respect to the exact mode of preparation and quantity of it required (proper dose), and the proper period for repeating the dose; - if, finally, he knows the obstacles to recovery in each case and is aware how to remove them, so that the restoration may be permanent, then he understands how to treat judiciously and rationally, and he is a true practitioner of the healing art.”

Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) German physician best known for creating a system of alternative medicine called homeopathy

Aphorism 3 of The Organon of the Healing Art http://www.homeopathyhome.com/reference/organon/organon.html.

Disease, Art, Understanding

“She [Venison] had never travelled and so could invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people are, by knowledge of certain places only.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

People, Travel

“To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

"The Lover and the Beloved", p. 1.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)

“I considered, that history is the inexhaustible mine, out of which political knowledge is to be brought up.”

James Burgh book Political Disquisitions

General Preface
Political Disquisitions (1774)

History

“The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Nature

“Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 189.

“Thought is led, by the situation of its objects, to measure their truth in terms of another logic, another universe of discourse. And this logic projects another mode of existence: the realization of the truth in the words and deeds of man. And inasmuch as this project involves man as societal animal,” the polis, the movement of thought has a political content. Thus, the Socratic discourse is political discourse inasmuch as it contradicts the established political institutions. The search for the correct definition, for the “concept” of virtue, justice, piety, and knowledge becomes a subversive undertaking, for the concept intends a new polis.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 133-134

Truth, Justice, Search, Universe

“The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. Common knowledge, but important nonetheless.”

Reggie Watts (1972) singer, musician and comedian

Cited in: Beats That Defy Boxes: Reggie Watts at TED 2012 https://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way. Posted February 2012.

Memory, Time, Future

“Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: The tongues of men. 1937, p. 15; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016) , " The contribution of John Rupert Firth to the history of linguistics and the rejection of the phoneme theory http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/014-senis.pdf." Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIII 273.

Parting

“More than anything the French have a profound knowledge of the ways of life. They possess a tolerance and an acceptance of the way things are. Problems are faced with intelligence, patience, and a sense of humanity. I have more respect for them than any other nationality on the face of the earth.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Life, Way, Intelligence, Problem

“To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Proms 2013: Daniel Barenboim interview http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/02/daniel-barenboim-conductor-interview, 8 May 2013.

Understanding

“One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live — for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

People, Stupidity, Business, Change

“How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate. (Dialectic - Dispute)”

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

Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A75, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men, Truth, Idea, Madness

“Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton's Lives of Game Animals to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

in Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists
Interviews

Books, Behavior, Game, Sense

“Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time how to do it. That part is not too difficult. There are many ways. Some of them are better than others. Most of them have drawbacks. So you use what knowledge you've got, and you invent a new way. You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method. You pay a lot of attention to the setup. Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important. But that stuff is meat and potatoes to you. You have no problem with careful preparation. No problem at all. How could you, with your intelligence? After all your training? You know the big problems will come afterward. How do you make sure you get away with it? You use your knowledge. You know more than most people about how the cops work. You've seen them on duty many times, sometimes close-up. You know what they look for. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You go through it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. Just as carefully as you would mark the play card you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune.”

Lee Child book Running Blind

Source: Running Blind (2000), Ch. 1.

People, Way, Intelligence, Problem

“Every person who seeks to practise agriculture with the full success which it admits—and that is the natural aim of every one who engages in it—must possess energy, activity, reflection, perseverance, and a knowledge of all the kindred and accessory sciences.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section I: The fundamental principles, p. 8.

Nature, Science, Success, Personality

“The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when Wells was promoting the concept of a "World Brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopaedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge. He remarks: "our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before."”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

(Wells, 1938) </blockquote>
First paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World, Motivation, Idea, Universe

“We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: “bottom-up” mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, “top-down” mechanisms make use of stored information (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain." Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3-4 (2005): p. 334

Memory

“Isn’t science, as some maintain, based on a “faith” that it’s good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: we prefer to know the truth because accepting what’s false doesn’t give us useful answers about the universe.”

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 211

Truth, Faith, Universe, Science

“Today the world has far more potential than in the past to understand the message of the Holy Prophet (s. w. a). The more human knowledge increases, the more likely it becomes that the message of Islam will gain ground. The more powerful people in different parts of the world use brutal tools in order to suppress human feelings and to bring them under their yoke, the more the ground will be prepared for identifying the light of Islam and the more thirsty human beings will become for Islam. Today we see the signs of this thirst for the message of Islam, which is the message of monotheism, the message of spirituality, the message of justice, the message of human dignity. Human beings are enthusiastic about the message of Islam.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

"Supreme Leader's Speech in a Meeting with Officials and Ambassadors of Islamic Countries" http://english.khamenei.ir//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1871&Itemid=4, Khamenei.ir (October 25, 2000) 2000

People, World, Justice, Feeling

“Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Liebe, Arbeit und Wissen sind die Quellen unseres Lebens. Sie sollen es auch regieren.
His personal motto; the German phrase is found in the preamble of Charakteranalyse (1971 [1933]); the English translation was used at least as early as The Function of the Orgasm (1948), a translation of Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927).

Love, Life, Spring

“In truth, many of the challenges faced by Sanatana Dharma have been self-created. We can blame others and point out the impact of globalization, foreign rule and other religions—and, perhaps, they can be blamed to a certain extent—but they are not the primary cause. The primary cause is our carelessness: we have failed to cherish and protect the invaluable wealth that is this culture. More accurately, we have not been courageous enough to do so. We ourselves have been digging the grave into which this culture of vast and ancient knowledge could become buried.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Practice Spiritual Values & Save the World (2013)

Truth, Religion, Courage, Wealth

“And Charlie asked questions! His unease had long since disappeared, and two of his most deep-dyed characteristics took over: one, the result of his omnivorous, undisciplined, indefatigable reading and picking of brains; second, the great gaping holes this had left in his considerable body of knowledge. Both appeared far more drastic than he had heretofore known; he knew ever so much more than he knew he knew, and he had between five and seven times as much misinformation and ignorance than he had ever dreamed.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 19 (p. 59)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Dreams, Question, Appearance, Time

“The most important, the most fundamental and the deepest investigations are those that affect human life and activities most profoundly. Only those scientists who have laboured, not with the aim of producing this or that, but with the sole desire to advance knowledge ultimately prove to be the greatest benefactors of humanity.”

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

[Raman, C. V., Chandralekha, Why the Sky is Blue: Dr. C.V. Raman Talks about Science, http://books.google.com/books?id=LOC3vbnTgHYC&pg=PT1, 2010, Tulika Books, 978-81-8146-846-8, 17]

Life

“No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Annotations to Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas - translated by Austin Craig

God, Religion

“The minimum principle that unified the knowledge of light, gravitation, and electricity of Hamilton's time no longer suffices to relate these fundamental branches of physics. Within fifty years of its creation, the belief that Hamilton's principle would outlive all other physical laws of physics was shattered. Minimum principles have since been created for separate branches of physics… but these are not only restricted… but seem to be contrived…
A single minimum principle, a universal law governing all processes in nature, is still the direction in which the search for simplicity is headed, with the price of simplicity now raised from a mastery of differential equations to a mastery of the calculus of variations.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 442.

Law, Search, Nature, Light

“If you, dear reader, are looking a this across some great gulf of time and increase of knowledge, spare me your condescension. You too were young once, and ignorant once, and from a future standpoint—perhaps your own—you are young and ignorant still.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 21 “But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky!” (p. 358)

Time, Future

“This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 39

World, Help

“He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

George Balanchine in Nabokov, Ivan and Carmichael, Elizabeth. "Balanchine, An Interview". Horizon, January 1961, pp. 44-56. (M).

Music, Time, Dance

“This is the song for Baby Birch.
I will never know you.
And at the back of what we've done,
there is that knowledge of you.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Have One On Me (2010)

Baby

“I am afraid that I do not believe that any body of men can have enough knowledge of the past, the present and the future to establish “development priorities” — which presumably means procuring some developments as being good and prohibiting others as being bad.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 27, 1968, page 212.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Men, Past, Future

“May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1998) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html 1990s

Wisdom, Understanding

“Von Bertalanffy also studied the works of, a pre-Socratic philosopher. Anaxogoras said that 'everything was everything else.' Therefore all categories of thinking were relative and all contradictions only apparent. According to Cusanus the knowledge of infinite God cannot be grasped by human mind it can only be approached from different directions. The idea of God has many aspects which appear to be contradictory. It is similar to a human face which may present different appearances when perceived from different perspectives.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 4

God, Idea, Thinking, Study

“We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.”

Warren Bennis (1925–2014) American leadership expert

Warren G. Bennis (1990) Why leaders can't lead: the unconscious conspiracy continues. p. 143
1990s

Understanding, Business

“The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Hope, Way, Understanding, Personality

“For the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with increasing strength of the opposing principle.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), P.5

Learning

“Doubt about the fact that insight wholesomeness consists of simply observing the presently arising mental and physical phenomena is also skeptical doubt. This doubt is so subtle that it is rarely detected but is instead mistaken for investigation. This doubt masquerades as analytical knowledge. The commentary on Netti Yuttihāra explains as follows: "Doubt appears in the guise of investigation."”

Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982) Burmese Buddhist philosopher

Source: Manual of Insight (1945), p. 64

Appearance

“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

Death, Flowers, Freedom

“I tell you this morning, my friends, there’s no way to get rid of Him. And all of our new knowledge will not diminish God's being one iota. Neither the microcosmic compass of the atom nor the vast interstellar ranges of interstellar space can make God irrelevant for living in a universe, where stellar distance must be measured in light years, where stars are five hundred million million miles from the earth, where heavenly bodies travel at incredible speeds. Modern man still has to cry out with the Psalmist, "When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands and all that thou hast created; what is man, that thou is mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou hast remembered him?"”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

God, Way, Travel, Star

“Faith plays an important role in an open society. Exactly because our understanding is imperfect, we cannot base our decisions on knowledge alone. We need to rely on beliefs, religious or otherwise, to help us make decisions. But we must remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong so that we can correct our mistakes. Otherwise, we are bound to be wrong.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

Faith, Understanding, Decision, Help

“As those of us know who have taken part in battle, it is one thing to manoeuvre freely when secure in the knowledge that the man behind the gun is doing his best to miss us, but it is quite another thing when that same man is doing his utmost to liquidate you.”

Frederick E. Morgan (1894–1967) British Army general

Comment to his staff officers, on the crucial distinction between intensive battle training and actual battle (19 May 1943), quoted in History of COSSAC (May 1944) http://www.history.army.mil/documents/cossac/Cossac.htm by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

Parting

“You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.”

Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.

explaining what's the best way of thinking, in an oral history conducted in 1995 by Andrew Goldstein, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.

“I'm sometimes asked what are the pluses and minuses of celebrity … and, for me, the biggest plus is being successful at something that I love to do. The minuses, unfortunately, include having to live with security and the knowledge that you may be stalked. … I do like people … I have lots of friends, but I can only be who I am.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Love, People, Success

“Since there is no real silence, silence will contain all the sounds, all the words, all the languages, all knowledge, all memory.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Silence Is the Universal Library http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21396/Silence_Is_the_Universal_Library_ From the poems written in English

Silence, Memory

“I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963); longer passage http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/ike1.html quoted at Montclair State University 1960s

War, Feeling, Time, Fight

“Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 111.
The Guardian (1713)

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

What is Enlightenment? (1978)

Life, Time

Quotes about knowledge page 33

Quotes about knowledge
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