Individual Knowledge Quotes

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.

Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

The wearer knowes, where the shoe wrings.

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests.... The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, "Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.

Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.

I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

I don't think anyone knows as much about what's right for me as I do.

Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and...each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests...civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering intelligence, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.

The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other.

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.