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It’s very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know. Bill Buckley, Best of Enemies ***** response to panel question about thinking on your feet, 2015
The mystery is that religion is but a tool to control the masses. Knowledge (or wisdom) is their only god, through which man himself will become god. The snake and the dragon are both symbols of wisdom. Lucifer is a personification of the symbol. It was Lucifer who tempted Eve to entice Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge and thus free man from the bonds of ignorance. The WORSHIP (a lot different from STUDY) of knowledge, science, or technology is Satanism in its purest form, its secret symbol is the all-seeing eye in the pyramid. Bill Cooper, Secret Societies/New World Order
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing. H L Mencken
All knowledge resolves itself into probability ... In every judgment, which we can form concerning probability, as well as concerning knowledge, we ought always to correct the first judgment deriv’d from the nature of the object, by another judgment, deriv’d from the nature of the understanding. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1888
Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. Frederick Douglass
I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief. Immanuel Kant
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. Immanuel Kant
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Immanuel Kant
It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge. Adolf Hitler
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’. Duke of Wellington
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance – these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community. J Robert Oppenheimer
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. J Robert Oppenheimer, MIT lecture
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Louis Pasteur, cited Rene Jules Dubos, ‘Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science’ 1960
Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake. Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World, 1984
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. Karl Popper
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars. Arthur Eddington, Stars and Atoms, 1928
All men desire to know. Not all forms of knowledge are equal. The best is the pure and disinterested knowledge for the causes of things. Aristotle, Metaphysics
Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge. Enrico Fermi, 1901-54
One thing is that I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs, in different degrees of certainty, about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything and of many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me. Richard Feynman, interview BBC Horizon 1981
We’re exploring. We’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world. ibid.
The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, 1955
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don’t give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don’t know. Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1985
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree. Then he says, ‘I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,’ and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question, Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. Richard P Feynman