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Knowledge Quotes
"He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them...They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers."
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"Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation."
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"Maybe knowledge is power, but it's damned hard to think a burglar to death."
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"120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer."
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"Truth is what reconciles thought and experience."
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"Science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat logical well-explained packages. The fey are magical capricious illogical and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries so naturally we do not exist. That type of nonbelief is fatal to faries."
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"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge."
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"Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned."
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"One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other."
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"If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics."
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"In the intelligence community, a rumor was almost as good as a confirmation."
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"Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer."
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"Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms."
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"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
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"A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of."
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"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses."
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"But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.' Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book."
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"Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd."
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"No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy."
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"Understanding how little we know is crucial to gaining knowledge."
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"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."
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"Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous."
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"What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them."
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"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this."
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"Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise."
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"Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question."
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"Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat."
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"There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality."
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"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
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"Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey."
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"To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem."
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"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
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"I've been reading Greek mythology since I was a kid. I also taught it when I was a sixth grade teacher, so I knew a lot of mythological monsters already. Sometimes I still use books and Web sites to research, though. Every time I research Greek mythology, I learn something new!"
18
"Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2."
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