Will Rogers Quotes

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.

I think that a lot of people in all walks of life have the impression, of course, that, 'I specialize in something. I can't - I don't have the time to read other things. I'll just go to pure entertainment when I'm relaxing, and then I'll come back to my pure specialty.' That produces - that attitude produces idiot savants, unfortunately.

Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.

Definition: CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.

Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.

It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

My understanding of religion and science is that they're both arrogant schools of thought, and whether they acknowledge it or not they continually broadcast the idea that they have the world figured out. And what they don't know, they have a theory for which is probably correct. It feels like that shrinks the world, rather than expands it.

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn't know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.

Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work.

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.