Knowing What We Know Quotes

“Those who most commonly win their knowledge from the Internet reportedly do so very much less thoroughly and deeply than do those who bury themselves in books. They know they can always return to the Web and reload the page to find out anything further they might wish to know. There is no need to learn anything in depth. Bullet points will do just fine. To be able to discuss, argue, discern, think about, and value the importance of the knowledge so gathered represents, or so behavioral specialists tell us, a vanishing set of skills.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds,”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“violent opposition from mediocre minds,”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“If our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“And if a featherlike touch on the glass surface of a tiny handheld instrument that is today still called a telephone even though it is everything but, and if that touch can command the billions of transistors within the device to connect to equipment unseen that is buried in vaults unknown and from there instantly summon up all that is known and has ever been known about any topic imaginable—what implications does such a development have for humankind?”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Since we know who pushed what book to the floor, we have all the components to be able to say we now have knowledge of this particular small event. We have context, we have a degree of certainty of who pushed the book, of what happened and to what, and where the event occurred. And if somewhere in the scene there is a clock, or a time stamp, we know from these additional scraps of information the likely when of the occurrence. All that is missing is the why: inherent”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“This clip, however, is marginally more informative than the two images, in that it seems to offer the viewer a measure of understanding. We now know how the book came to be on the floor. We have, in other words, a measure of information of an event that conjoined the two data points that were offered by the pair of still images. But”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“know-nothing into know-how and know-why, know-what and know-that and know-who, and of being learned and fully aware and ready to wield that power for, one would hope, the good of all.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in the old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Making a structure takes time and planning and care; tearing something down is invariably quick and messy”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“John Templeton’s views are regarded by some as eccentric, naive, or dangerously anti-science but by many others as thoughtful, positive, and in today’s increasingly unhinged world, vitally necessary.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“appointed vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, calculated that God made the world on October 23, 4004 BC, but he was able to further refine Ussher’s arithmetic, proving that God got started at exactly 9:00 that morning, presumably after His breakfast.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“young orphaned Bertrand initially faltered—until the moment when, at age eleven, his older brother introduced him to the logical purity of Euclidean geometry. Suddenly mathematics, as well as a near-fanatical interest in peace, became the young man’s watchwords. It was then that he began his “relentless search for knowledge,” as he later described it, which seems to characterize all soi-disant polymaths, of which he was to be a prime exemplar.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Teach Your Children Well A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity. —attributed to Samuel Johnson, dedication to Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, 1775”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“the hallmark of the Enlightenment was off to the races.”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“With geology—a knowledge-based account of the nature of planet Earth, which one might legitimately regard as the ur-science—now unleashed from churchly teaching, other kinds of rational thinking started to seep into and infect all the other realms of natural philosophy. Science in its most general sense took off as a legitimate field of study and challenge, and the free-thinking rationality and free will that is the”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“Epigraph For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance—the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. —Sir Karl Popper, lecture to the British Academy (1960) Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic