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A man is but what he knows.
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-Francis Bacon
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*I thought that I knew
everything, 'til everything changed.
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-The Badlees, (Bret Alexander-lyrics, Jeff
Fertenberger, Pete Palladino, Ron Simasek, Paul Smith)
River Songs, 1995
"Fear of Falling"
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*A good half of all we see
is seen through the eyes of others.
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-Marc Bloch
Historical Analysis, 1942
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Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. The
man who knows nothing thinks he is teaching others what he has just learned
himself; the man who knows a great deal can't imagine that what he is saying
is not common knowledge, and speaks indifferently.
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-Jean de la Bruyere
Les Caracteres / Characters, 1688
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Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not
also how to un-know.
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-Richard Francis Burton
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I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant
of what I do not know.
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-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Not the sword: Knowledge.
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-Emperor Constantine
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We used to think that if we knew one, we knew
two, because one and one is two. We are finding that we must learn a great
deal more about 'and'.
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-Sir Arthur Eddington
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The difference between what the most and least
learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is
unknown.
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-Albert Einstein
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I would rather live in a world where my life
is surrounded my mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could
comprehend it.
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-Henry Emerson Fosdick
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We dance round a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
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-Robert Frost
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Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.
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-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If one is master of one thing and understands
one thing well, one has, at the same time, insight into and understanding of
many things.
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-Vincent van Gogh
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Ever since the beginning of modern science, the
best minds have recognized that 'the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow
with the advance of science.' Unfortunately, the popular effect of this
scientific advance had been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists,
that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can
therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human
activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of
knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.
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-F.A. Hayek
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Far more crucial than what we know or do not
know is what we do not want to know. One often obtains a clue to a person's
nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain
impressions.
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-Eric Hoffer
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*Do we know any least thing
to serve us now?
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-Homer
The Odyssey, c. 800 BC
Bk. X : The Grace of the Witch, 211-212
Robert Fitzgerald, trans., 1962
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The known is finite, the unknown infinite;
intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little
more land.
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-Thomas Henry Huxley
(cf. ISLANDS : Islands of Knowledge)
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*It is all too easy for us
today to as we stand upon the shoulders of those who went before us to
criticize them for being unaware of what now appears self-evident to
us.
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-Carter Lindberg
The European Reformations, 1996
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He that knows anything, knows this, in the
first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance.
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-John Locke
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We never stop investigating. We are never
satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads to
another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our
species.
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-Desmond Morris
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I seem to have been only like a boy playing on
the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble
or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.
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-Isaac Newton
(cf. ISLANDS : Islands of Knowledge)
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*To man. . .the object of
knowledge is not a narrow corner of a single planet, but the universe in all
its immensity, from the remote past to the distant future, and from the most
miniscule (unperceivable) particles of physics to the farthest
(unperceivable) galaxies of astronomy.
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-Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 1991
Chapter 3: "Concept-Formation"
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*Is it not rather the case
that the man who prepares himself most carefully to apprehend by his
intellect the essence of each thing which he examines will come nearest to the knowledge of it?
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-The character Socrates, in Plato's
Phaedo, 65e
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Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm
to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold
on the mind.
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-Plato
The Republic
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Knowledge is true opinion.
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-Plato
Theaetetus
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*We ask, why must we know, but it has no
answer to give us. We must know that we may know.
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-Equality 7-2521, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Anthem, 1937
Ch. I
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*[T]he only direct,
introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.
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-Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, 1943
"Introduction to Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition", May, 1968
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*Do not say that you're
afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in
surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and
act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of
your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the
fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you
omniscience--that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make
you infallible--that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths
accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but
the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A is A, Chapter VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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We are an intelligent species and the use of
our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain
is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a
kind of ecstasy.
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-Carl Sagan
Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Sand
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The more restrictions there are on what matter
and energy can do, the more knowledge human beings can attain.
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-Carl Sagan
Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Sand
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*The surface of the Earth
is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we
know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our
toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean
calls.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"
(cf. ISLANDS : Islands of Knowledge)
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*If there were no books,
no written records, think how prodigious a time twenty-three centuries would
be. With four generations per century, twenty-three centuries occupies almost
a hundred generations of human beings. If information could be passed on
merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of our past, how slow
would be our progress! Everything would depend on what ancient findings we
had accidentally been told about , and how accurate the account was. Past
information might be revered, but in successive retellings it would become
progressively more muddled and eventually lost. Books permit us to voyage
through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us
with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted form Nature, of the
greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire
planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to
inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the
human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think
the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the
underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested
by how well we support our libraries.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory"
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*Knowing a great deal is
not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also
judgement, the manner in which information is collected and used.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter X, "The Persistence of Memory"
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The main fuel to speed the world's progress
is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.
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-Julian Simon
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The larger the island of knowledge, the
longer the shoreline of wonder.
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-Ralph W. Sockman
(cf. ISLANDS : Islands of Knowledge)
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The first step to knowledge is to know that
we are ignorant.
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-Socrates
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Physicists have determined that even the most
solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the
submicroscopic level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness
have such incredible density and weight, and are linked to one another by
such powerful forces, that together they produce all the properties of
concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way, specks of
knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything
depends upon how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one
another.
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-Thomas Sowell
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The more you know, the less you understand.
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-The Tao te Ching
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Any progress in knowledge, any worthwhile
achievement, depends on our attempts to transcend one particular viewpoint
and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.
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-Unknown
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I liked things better when I didn't understand
them.
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-Calvin, a character in Bill Watterston's
comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes
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We live on an island surrounded by a sea of
ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our
ignorance.
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-John A. Wheeler
(cf. ISLANDS : Islands of Knowledge)
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