Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 16 (p. 171)
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”
“Keeping people neurotic and depressed and ignorant and self-doubting is oppressive.”
“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston, Massachusetts (30 January 1978)
“Answer honestly… Disabuse me of my ignorance.”
On how he would recommend Colbert Report guests approach interviews, on A Conversation with Stephen Colbert (1 December 2006).
Context: Answer honestly... Disabuse me of my ignorance. Don’t let me get away with anything. Don’t try to play my game. Be real. Be passionate. Hold your ideas. Give me resistance. Give me traction I can work against. The friction between reality, or the truly held concerns of the person, and the farcical concerns that I have, or my need to seem important, as opposed to actually understanding what’s true... Where those two things meet is where the comedy happens. So be real. That's the best thing you can do. And call me on my bullshit.
Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 12, “Sorcery in the Dark” (p. 129)
Translation as quoted in The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe (1917) by Dorothy Stimson, p. 115
Context: If perchance there should be foolish speakers who, together with those ignorant of all mathematics, will take it upon themselves to decide concerning these things, and because of some place in the Scriptures wickedly distorted to their purpose, should dare to assail this my work, they are of no importance to me, to such an extent do I despise their judgment as rash. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, the writer celebrated in other ways but very little in mathematics, spoke somewhat childishly of the shape of the earth when he derided those who declared the earth had the shape of a ball. So it ought not to surprise students if such should laugh at us also. Mathematics is written for mathematicians to whom these our labors, if I am not mistaken, will appear to contribute something even to the ecclesiastical state the headship of which your Holiness now occupies. (Author's preface to de revolutionibus) http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina:Nicolai_Copernici_torinensis_De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium.djvu/8
“My ignorance is trying to flatter me that I know everything.”
“I have no idea of the extent of this zoo. I know only my corner and whatever passes before me.”
A Tiger for Malgudi (1982)
