Quotes about knowledge

"The fact that we don't know how to do it doesn't prove its impossibility."

'We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.'

Data are not the same as information. Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

We are creatures of conditioning, Commander. We assume that what we know is easy, and we find mysterious whatever we do not.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious.”

And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence.

But was it not you who used to tell me that the more you knew, the better? That knowledge was the sharpest fang?

I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

I am never afraid of what I know.

I know it’s hard to grasp at first. I seem to recall I was a bit difficult to convince once. We are accustomed to thinking we know everything. There’s a powerful tendency to just disbelieve anything that doesn’t fit the preconception.

“It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”