Knowledge Control Quotes

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

Since the discovery of printing, knowledge has been called to power, and power has been used to make knowledge a slave.

Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple; you're going to be as smart as God." We can't have that.

We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.

Ours has become a culture more concerned with developing personal relationships than wrestling with ideas and innovations that shape the future.... [O]pportunities will arise from control of knowledge.

But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

The more dependent you are, the more ignorant you must be, and that's how they want you.

How shall I speak thee, or thy power address Thou God of our idolatry, the Press. . . . . Like Eden's dead probationary tree, Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.

The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.

Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side and not theirs.

All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.