“When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.”

— Ernest Gellner

Plough, Sword, and Book : The Structure of Human History (1988), Ch. 5 : Codification, p. 123

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Ernest Gellner 32

Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist 1925–1995

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“When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Plough, Sword and Book (1988)
Context: When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.

“When speaking of a “body of knowledge” or of “the results of research,” e. g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 77

“Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), Ch. 3, Beyond Language, p. 46.

“It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”

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

Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=omwRAAAAYAAJ&q=%22It+is+the+province+of+knowledge+to+speak+and+it+is+the+privilege+of+wisdom+to+listen%22&pg=PA264#v=onepage and The Atlantic Monthly October 1872 http://books.google.com/books?id=psqcIq5UxYkC&q=%22It+is+the+province+of+knowledge+to+speak+and+it+is+the+privilege+of+wisdom+to+listen%22&pg=PA427#v=onepage
The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

“What is knowledge? Ever since class society came into being the world has had only two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of the struggle of production and knowledge of the class struggle. Natural science and social science are the crystallization of these two kinds of knowledge, and philosophy is the generalization and summation of the knowledge of nature.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Original: (zh-CN) 什么是知识？自从有阶级的社会存在以来，世界上的知识只有两门，一门叫做生产斗争知识，一门叫做阶级斗争知识。自然科学、社会科学，就是这两门知识的结晶，哲学则是关于自然知识和社会知识的概括和总结。 note: "整顿党的作风"
Source: "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (1942)

“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

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

According to Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, this is not one of Einstein's identifiable quotations. (Source: paralegalpie.com http://www.paralegalpie.com/paralegalpie/2009/11/did-anybody-really-say-that.html.)
The phrase "the only source of knowledge is experience" is found in an English-language essay from 1896: "We can only be guided by what we know, and our only source of knowledge is experience" (Arthur J. Pillsbury, "The Final Word" https://books.google.com/books?id=Mw9IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA595&dq=%22only+source", Overland Monthly, November 1896). The thought can be seen as a paraphrase of John Locke's argument from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Whence has it [the Mind] all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, From Experience". (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding/Book II/Chapter I, 2.)
The phrase "information is not knowledge" is also found from the nineteenth century https://books.google.com/books?id=W2oAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22information+is+not+knowledge%22.
Misattributed

“Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge.”

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 28

“It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality
Context: The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world. <!-- p. 277

“The social stock of knowledge differentiates reality by degrees of familiarity… my knowledge of my own occupation and its world is very rich and specific, while I have only very sketchy knowledge of the occupational worlds of others.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 43

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