Superficial Understanding Quotes

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

I would love to be remembered for ridding the world of disease, but my knowledge of science comes from episodes of 'Nova' and shows on the Discovery Channel. I don't think a superficial understanding of shark behavior and black holes can help cure diseases.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

… too much of a talker to be a deep thinker

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Liberty and Nationality are mere lyrics to them of which they understand nothing.

It's impossible to explain to people who you are in a five-minute interview on TV.

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

People look at you, and they think they know you. They think they can place you in a certain category by what they think they know about you. But there's so much more to all of us than what we know and what we see at face value.

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

You never knew about people, like you never knew how deep a pond was because all you saw was the top.

People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.