Knowledge

Saint Edmund of Abingdon - Learn as if you will live forever; live as though you would die tomorrow. Latin original: Disce quasi semper victurus; vive quasi cras moriturus.

Thomas Adam (in Private Thoughts on Religion: And Other Subjects Connected with it, 1786) - Hell is truth seen too late.

Alan Alda (Connecticut College commencement address, June 1st, 1980) - Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Hannah Arendt (1974 interview with Roger Errera) - If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

Raymond Aron - Pour le philosophe rien n'est définitivement acquis. English: Philosophers will never take anything for conclusively established.

Isaac Asimov (Newsweek, January 21st, 1980) - There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov (in Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Questions, 1988) - The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Roger Bacon - There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, 

Kaushik Basu (World Bank economist) - One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.

Ophelia Benson - We have to respect everyone’s right to hold irrational beliefs, but we do not have to respect the irrational beliefs themselves.

Claude Bernard - C’est ce que nous pensons déjà connaître qui nous empêche souvent d’apprendre. English: It is often what we think we know that prevents us from learning.

Peter Bernstein - (in Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, 1996) - The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not the information you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.

Ambrose Bierce - Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Josh Billings - As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

Sir James Black - I call it the principle of obliquity: Goals are often best achieved without intending them.

Tim Blanning (in The Romantic Revolution, 2011) - The Enlightenment believed that to collect and publish all human knowledge would lead to the improvement of humanity. The romantics thought they knew better.

Gurwinder Bhogal  - The brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

Gurwinder Bhogal  - People seem to have a zero-sum approach to truth, where if the mainstream opinion is wrong then those on the fringes must necessarily be right (and vice versa). But science is not a seesaw; it’s possible to disagree with an idiot and still be an idiot.

Alberto Brandolini (2013, known as Brandolini's law) - The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

J.A.C. Brown (in Techniques of Persuasion) - (1) Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, (2) want to have their prejudices confirmed, (3) want to feel that they ‘belong’ with the implication that others do not, and (4) need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations.

William Bruce Cameron (Sociologist, 1963) often wrongly credited to Albert Einstein - Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Samuel Butler - Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Albert Camus (Combat, 1948) - When we are among people who think they are absolutely right, we suffocate. French original: Nous étouffons parmi les gens qui croient avoir absolument raison.

Sir Winston Churchill - Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Coluche - Quand on est malade, il ne faut surtout pas aller à l’hôpital : la probabilité de mourir dans un lit d’hôpital est dix fois plus grande que dans son lit à la maison.

Condorcet - Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée. Repris par André Gide (in Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits, 1952) - Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent.

Confucius - To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

Bernard Crick (1962) - I am constantly depressed by the capacity of academics to over-complicate things.

Howard G. Cunningham - The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. ("Cunningham's Law")

Anthony Daniels (2021) - There is a certain kind of erudition which, allied to a talent for polysyllabic obfuscation, is not incompatible with extreme shallowness.

Joel Davitz (1976) - I suspect that most research in the social sciences has roots somewhere in the personal life of the researcher, though these roots are rarely reported in published papers.

Democritus (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) - Many much-learned men have no intelligence. (Greek original: Πολλοὶ πολυμαθέες νοῦν οὐκ ἔχουσιν.)

Philip K. Dick - Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.

Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four, 1890) - When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Kevin Drum (2012) - The internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Or in simpler terms, the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter.

Annie Duke (in Thinking in bets, 2018) - The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

Attributed to Albert Einstein - Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein - We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Eric Falkenstein (2020) - Simple beat sophisticated, as is often the case. Socrates and Jesus criticized the sophists and Pharisees, respectively, because these official intellectuals were sanctimonious hair-splitters, and missed the forest for the trees. (...) Sophisticates use their superior knowledge to out-argue, not find the truth.

Richard Feynman - Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Richard Feynman (1974) - The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Alain Finkielkraut (in La défaite de la pensée, 1987) - When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. (Quand la haine de la culture devient elle-même culturelle, la vie avec la pensée perd toute signification.)

Stuart Firestein (in Ignorance: How It Drives Science, 2012) - Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.

Henry Ford - Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. (a.k.a. the first step fallacy)

Keith Frankish - Philosophy [is] the science of misguided questions.

Keith Frankish - Reasoning [is] the process of convincing oneself that one is right.

Benjamin Franklin (Letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 13 November 1789) - In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!

Attribué à Charles de Gaulle - Des chercheurs qui cherchent, on en trouve. Mais des chercheurs qui trouvent, on en cherche...

James Gleick - When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

Ben Goldacre - I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

Jonah Goldberg - A lot of philosophical verbiage (...) is intended to buy authority unearned by argument. (...) Jargon is both gnosis and shibboleth all at once. 

Gerhart von Graevenitz (in Mythos, 1987) - Myths invite identification with a past figure, event, object, or idea that might substitute for a shortcoming in the present.

Walter Gropius - The mind is like an umbrella. It is most useful when open.

John Haldane - The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Tim Harford - In a complex world, the scarcest resource is omniscience.

Tim Harford - What colour is a rainbow? On average, white. 

Wrongly attributed to Stephen Hawking - The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Friedrich von Hayek - Civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge that we do not possess.

Friedrich von Hayek (Nobel Prize lecture, 1974) - I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

Joseph Heath - Reason cannot win in a head-to-head contest against unreason. So when someone is being unreasonable, the best you can do is point out how unreasonable they are, often to comedic effect. This is why satire has always occupied a prominent role in Enlightenment polemic (with Voltaire being the best-known practitioner).

Joseph Heath - As individuals, we have enormous difficulty thinking the negative. We see patterns all around us, and each new day brings new evidence that confirms our belief in them. Thinking through the hypothetical “What if I am wrong?” is not something that comes naturally. Having other people around whose sole interest lies in doing just that not only serves as an external corrective, it also pushes us to think in a way that our thoughts do not naturally go.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (in Phenomenology of Spirit) - The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is for that very reason unknown.

Martin Heidegger (in Beitrage Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)) - Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. (German original: Das Sichverstandlichmachen ist der Selbstmord der Philosophie.)

Martin Heidegger (in Was heißt Denken?) - Science does not think. (German original: Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht.)

Werner Heisenberg - An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Christopher Hitchens - That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. (Hitchens’ razor)

Eric Hoffer - There is a homesickness for the Middle-Ages in typical intellectuals.

Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (in Surfaces and Essences, 2013) - Without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts. (...) The human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts. (. . .) Analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. 

August Wilhelm von Hofman (Chemist, discoverer of formaldehyde, 1818–92) - I will listen to any hypothesis, but on one condition – that you show me a method by which it can be tested.

Sherlock Holmes (in A Scandal in Bohemia) - It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt - [Language] makes infinite use of finite media.

Aldous Huxley (in Proper Studies, 1927) - Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

William Ralph Inge (1929) - What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Steve Jobs - People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Samuel Johnson -

The modern method is to count;

The ancient one was to guess.

Joseph Joubert - L’art de bien dire ce qu’on pense est différent de la faculté de penser (...) Le talent de bien exprimer n’est pas celui de concevoir.

Joseph Joubert - The aim of argument, or any discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

Dan Kahan (Law and psychology, Yale) - We all process information consistent with our tribe.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

Immanuel Kant - What can I know, what must I do, what can I hope for ? (Was kann ich wissen, was soll ich tun, was darf ich hoffen ?)

Lord Kelvin (1883) - When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

John Maynard Keynes - The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

John Maynard Keynes - Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

Irving Kristol - An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.

David Lahti (2013) - Most philosophers and social scientists still practice their arts as though humans are not a product of evolution. This is astonishing and becomes more so with each passing decade.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson - Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort at mutual understanding. But when we are preoccupied with the battle aspects, we often lose sight of the cooperative aspects.

Laozi - One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.

Latin proverb - Quid gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. English translation: What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Latin proverb - Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur. English translation: Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.

Latin proverb - Sutor, ne ultra crepidam. English translation: Shoemaker, do not venture opinions on other subjects than the shoe.

Fran Lebowitz (in Social Studies, 1981) - Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Attributed to Fran Lebowitz - I don't believe in anything you have to believe in.

John Lennon (from the song What You Got) - You don't know what you've got until you lose it

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) - Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for reestablishing our former ignorance?

Martin Luther - The multitude of books is a great evil.

Groucho Marx - A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Somerset Maugham (in A Writer's Notebook, 1946) - If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.

Marshall McLuhan (July 1966 Vogue article) - We do not know who discovered water, [but] it was almost certainly not a fish.

Margaret McMillan - I am always wary of the lessons of the past. There’s a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Gary Marcus (in Kluge, 2008) - Without special training, our species is inherently gullible. Children are born into a world of "revealed truths," where they tend to accept what they are told as gospel truth.

H.L. Mencken - For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken - A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859) - He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

Molière (in Les Femmes savantes, 1672) - Un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant.

Michel de Montaigne (Essais, Tome II) - Pourquoi ne croit-on pas qu'un nombre infini de lettres grecques versées au milieu de la place seraient pour arriver à la contexture de l'Iliade ?

Attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan - Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.

Charles Munger - If you can't state the opposing view on an issue at least as well as the people supporting it, then you're not entitled to your own view. Following this rule will prevent a great deal of stupidity.

Harry Myers & Mason Roberts (in Human Engineering, 1932) - Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.

John Nash avatar in the movie Beautiful Mind - Conviction is a luxury of those on the sidelines.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, 1873) - Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Be­yond Good and Evil: Pre­lude to a Phi­los­o­phy of the Fu­ture, §137) - Be­hind a re­mark­able scholar one often finds a mediocre man, and be­hind a mediocre artist, often, a re­mark­able man.

Larry Niven - The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He’s entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you’re in violation.

Pascal Ory - En histoire culturelle, une idée fausse est un fait vrai.

Flannery O’Connor - I have to write to discover what I am doing. (...) I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say.

Leslie Orgel (Biochemist) - Evolution is cleverer than you are.

George Orwell (in an unpublished preface to Animal Farm) - The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

Lionel Page - Reason likely did not evolve to help us be right, but to convince others that we are.

Tim Parks - Foreign languages are unsettling. They remind us how arbitrary the mental world is.

Ellen Parr - The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Marvin Perry (2002) - Mythmaking was humanity's first way of thinking; it was the earliest attempt to [...] make life comprehensible.

Steven Pinker - The curse of knowledge is a major reason that good scholars write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t know what they know.

Steven Pinker (in How the mind works, 1997) - A (...) reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not. Conflicts of interest are inherent to the human condition, and we are apt to want our version of the truth, rather than the truth itself, to prevail.

Michael Polanyi (1966) - We know more than we can tell. (Polanyi's Paradox)

Alexander Pope (in An Essay on Criticism, 1709) - A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing.

Karl Popper (in Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, 1976) - Never argue about words and their [true] meaning because such arguments are specious and insignificant.

Karl Popper - Agreement is comparatively unimportant in the search for truth. (...) People did strongly agree, for a long time, on many erroneous doctrines (...) and agreement is often the result of the fear of intolerance or even of violence.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1898) - Rotating inclinations (…) may create great writers, delightful conversationalists, and illustrious orators, but rarely scientific discoverers.

Naval Ravikant (2020) - Evolution works by mutation and selection. Innovation works by trial and error. Science works by conjecture and criticism. Free markets work by entrepreneurship and risk. All truth-seeking systems work roughly the same way.

Carveth Read  (in Logic, deductive and inductive, 1898) - It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.

James Richard­son - The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slow­er.

Bertrand Russell (in Mortals and Others, 1931-35) - The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell - Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Bertrand Russell (in On Education, 1926) - The average man’s opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.

Bertrand Russell (in How to Become a Philosopher, 1942) - The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man's world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man's, so that they cannot both be right. People's opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.

"Bertrand Russell is the Pope" - The story goes that Bertrand Russell, in a lecture on logic, mentioned that in the sense of material implication, a false proposition implies any proposition. A student raised his hand and said "In that case, given that 1 = 0, prove that you are the Pope." Russell immediately replied, "Add 1 to both sides of the equation: then we have 2 = 1. The set containing just me and the Pope has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so it has only 1 member; therefore, I am the Pope."

Paul Samuelson (in a 1970 TV interview, but he later reused these words attributing them to John Maynard Keynes) - When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

Arthur Schopenhauer - The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. (...) A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. German original : Daher ist, in Hinsicht auf unsere Lektüre, die Kunst, nicht zu lesen, höchst wichtig. Sie besteht darin, daß man das, was zu jeder Zeit soeben das größere Publikum beschäftigt, nicht deshalb auch in die Hand nehme, wie etwa politische oder kirchliche Pamphlete, Romane, Poesien u.dgl.m., die gerade eben Lärm machen, wohl gar zu mehreren Auflagen in ihrem ersten und letzten Lebensjahre gelangen: vielmehr denke man alsdann, daß, wer für Narren schreibt, allezeit ein großes Publikum findet (...) Um das Gute zu lesen, ist eine Bedingung, daß man das Schlechte nicht lese: denn das Leben ist kurz, Zeit und Kräfte beschränkt.

George Bernard Shaw - The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Allan Sherman (in A Gift of Laughter, 1965) - The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it.

Herbert Simon - What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Ray Solomonoff (in A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference, 1964) - Proposition: learning is compressing complexity by accepting a given amount of uncertainty.

Gennadi Sosonko - Only the most clever and the most stupid cannot change.

Thomas Sowell - What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

Thomas Sowell - Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.

Thomas Sowell - Many of the great disasters of our time have been committed by experts.

Dan Sperber (in The Guru Effect, 2010) - Obscurity of expression is considered a flaw. Not so, however, in the speech or writing of intellectual gurus. (...) All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp. Obscurity inspires awe, a fact I have been only too aware of, living as I have been in the Paris of Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and other famously hard to interpret maîtres à penser.

Statistique - Emprunté à l'allemand Statistik, forgé par l'économiste all. G. Achenwall (1719-1772), qui l'a dérivé de l'italien statista « homme d'État », la statistique représentant pour lui l'ensemble des connaissances que doit posséder un homme d'État (Brockhaus Enzykl.)

Steve Stewart-Williams - As a result of cumulative culture, we have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are.

Rory Sutherland (in Alchemy, 2019) - The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.

Rory Sutherland (in Alchemy, 2019) - We approve reasonable things too quickly, while counterintuitive ideas are frequently treated with suspicion (...) Most valuable discoveries don't make sense at first; if they did, someone would have discovered them already.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. English: The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Mr Justice Streatfield (1950) - Facts speak louder than statistics.

Bart Sturtewagen - Les mythes grandissent vite et meurent lentement.

Jonathan Swift (in The Examiner No. XIV, 1710)- Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

Philip Tetlock - There is a price to be paid for feeling good about your beliefs.

Me - The real purpose of philosophy is not to understand but to alleviate the discomfort of not understanding. It is an opiate.

Traditional - Les statistiques, c’est comme les bikinis, c’est ce qui est caché qui est intéressant.

Traditional - The average human being is born with one testicle.

Traditional - Culture is about chaps, geography is about maps.

Traditional, often wrongly credited to Albert Einstein - If you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough.

Traditional - It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.

Traditional - Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.

Traditional - You must learn from the mistakes of others. You will never live long enough to make them all yourself

Amos Tversky - One characteristic of good metaphors is the contrast between the prior, literal interpretation, and the posterior, metaphoric interpretation. Metaphors that are too transparent are uninteresting; obscure metaphors are uninterpretable. A good metaphor is like a good detective story. The solution should not be apparent in advance to maintain the reader’s interest, yet it should seem plausible after the fact to maintain coherence of the story. Consider the simile ‘‘An essay is like a fish.’’ At first, the statement is puzzling. An essay is not expected to be fishy, slippery, or wet. The puzzle is resolved when we recall that (like a fish) an essay has a head and a body, and it occasionally ends with a flip of the tail.

Wilfred Trotter (1941) - The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy.

Mark Twain - It is wiser to find out than to suppose.

Mark Twain - It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Mark Twain (in Corn-Pone Opinions, 1901) - We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.

Carl Vondrick (Google) - Computers are really good at memorization. The problem is teaching them how to forget.

Duncan Watts - Although it is rarely presented as such, this kind of circular reasoning—X succeeded because X had the attributes of X—pervades commonsense explanations for why some things succeed and others fail.

Duncan Watts (2017) - Just because something happens doesn’t mean it was inevitable, or even likely.

Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington - Wise people learn when they can. Fools learn when they must.

David Wessel (at 2013 AEA meeting) - We in journalism think that anecdote is the singular of data.

Alfred North Whitehead - We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Alfred North Whitehead - Seek simplicity and distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead - Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead (in Introduction to Mathematics) - Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead - The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Oscar Wilde (in The Importance of Being Earnest) - The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Robert Anton Wilson - Belief is the death of intelligence.

Yiddish saying - A half-truth is a whole lie (Original: A halber emes iz a gantser ligen).

Yiddish saying - Man thinks and God laughs (Original: A mentsh tracht un Got lacht).

Yiddish saying - The truth doesn't die but it lives like a poor man (Original: Der emess shtarbt nit ober er lebt vi an oreman).

Yiddish saying - To every answer you can find a new question (Original: Oif itlechen terets ken men gefinen a nei’eh kasheh).

Yiddish saying - A fool can ask more questions in an hour than a wise man can answer in a year (Original: A nar ken fregen mer frages in a sho vi a kluger ken entferen in a yor).

Jon Zelner, Kelly Broen & Ella August (2022) -