“When we are children, we think that adults know how the world works. When we become adults, we know enough about the world to know that we know nothing about it…”

Pierre Bouvier of Simple Plan https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/pierre-bouvier-of-simple-plan (February 6, 2020)

McKenna interview (1992)
Context: I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

Jornal Hoje, Rede Globo, June 9, 2007

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 12, “Puzzle Pieces Fitting” (p. 88)

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

Armistice Day speech (11 November 1948), published in Omar Bradley's Collected Writings, Volume 1 (1967).
Context: We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s
Context: Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

The forgotten advantage of concurrent programming

The Shining (1977)