Knowledge Hierarchy Quotes

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University.

Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.

Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

In our "age of the expert" the expert has his constituency — those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining the consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.

I served the famous professors and scholars, and eventually they learned that the Reverend Moon is superior to them. Even Nobel laureate academics who thought they were at the center of knowledge are as nothing in front of me.

The little Napoleons in UMNO try to keep out people who are more intelligent than themselves.

Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else.

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.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs.

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

In the business world an executive knows something about everything, a technician knows everything about something and the switchboard operator knows everything.

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

...neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.