#ignorance

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. ↗

— Alfred North Whitehead

#ignorance #knowledge

The people need to know that the people need to know. And I’m just the man to let them know that they need to know. However, what they need to know, I do not know. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#knowledge #life #needs #people #life

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? ↗

— Neil Postman

#ignorance #knowledge #media #nate-silver #opinions

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance. ↗

— William Wirt

#curiosity #desire #doubts #excited #ignorance

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance. ↗

— Akhenaton

#folly #fool #his #ignorance #knoweth

To act wisely when the time for action comes, to wait patiently when it is time for repose, put man in accord with the tides. Ignorance of this law results in periods of unreasoning enthusiasm on the one hand, and depression on the other. ↗

— Helena Petrova Blavatsky

#act #action #comes #depression #enthusiasm

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. ↗

— George Eliot

#down #hour #ignorance #knowledge #pulls

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human. ↗

— Desiderius Erasmus

#deception #folly #hear #human #i

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better. ↗

— Edward de Bono

#better #continue #doing #freeze #frozen

With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral. ↗

— James Bovard

#attention #attention deficit #combination #death #deficit