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"It is simply not true that works of fiction, prose or verse, that is to say works depicting the actions, thoughts and words and passions of imaginary human beings, directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalization. Knowledge of life obtained through fiction is only possible by another stage of self-consciousness. That is to say, it can only be a knowledge of other people's knowledge of life, not of life itself." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "All claims to scientific knowledge are at least potentially subject to additional tests. Why accept tentative knowledge when others offer absolute knowledge? Because it is only by accepting the tentativeness of scientific knowledge that we gain the promise science holds out to us: an ever-improving and ever-expanding understanding of the universe around us. Science asks us to strike this bargain: Give up the goal of absolute knowledge, accept the permanent tentativeness of all scientific propositions, and in exchange it will give you a steadily improving understanding of the way things work. This is not a perfect method, and it is as subject to failures and foibles as anything humans do, but it is the best way we have and probably the best we will ever have of learning about our universe." Lee Cronk   "Evolution has made knowledge possible. Not necessarily reliable knowledge, but knowledge good enough, on average, to confer a benefit. Evolution has developed sociality to the point where members of many species can transfer knowledge across time: culture, in other words. As comparative and developmental psychology have shown, evolution has developed the human brain's capacity to understand false belief—to understand that others, or we ourselves, might be mistaken about a situation—and hence has driven our quest for better knowledge. Both human culture and our human awareness of the possibility of being mistaken have eventually given rise to science, to the systematic challenging of our own ideas. The methods of science make relatively rapid change and improvement possible—as well, of course, as unforeseen new problems. They offer no guarantee of the validity of individual ideas we propose, but they do offer the prospect of our collectively learning from one another." Brian Boyd   "Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?" John Milton   "We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others." Friedrich Hayek   "A realization that the market yields knowledge—the sort of knowledge that people do not at present even know they need—should engender among would-be social engineers who seek to replace or to modify the results of the free market a very definite sense of humility. To announce that one can improve on the performance of the market, one must also claim to know in advance what the market will reveal. This knowledge is clearly impossible in all circumstances. Indeed, where the market process has been thwarted, in general it will not be possible to point with certainty to what might have been discovered that has now been lost." Israel Kirzner   "The knowledge class had a profound distaste for the results of expanded suffrage. Woodrow Wilson, for example, complained about how difficult it was for progressives to influence 'the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.' In these circumstances, the knowledge class—meaning not necessarily those who were particularly knowledgeable, but those who identified with academic knowledge—concluded that legislative power should be removed a step further away from the populace. In effect, they said, 'Yes, you get the right to vote equally. But the details of legislative power will be exercised by members of our class.'" Philip Hamburger   "We know, with as much certainty as we know anything, that we have conscious thoughts and experiences; we have memories and dreams, we imagine, desire and regret things; we plan our actions and form intentions; we form emotional attachments and structure our lives around them. All of these things are underpinned, in a way that we do not yet understand, by the unbelievable complexity of the brain and its mechanisms, some of which extend into the body. We need to make connections between the knowledge that we have about our minds and the knowledge that we have of our bodies and brains: but we do not yet know how to connect this knowledge in a systematic, illuminating way." Tim Crane   "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, its continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses. Villagers who themselves feared to ascend the mountaintops located their departed ones on the impenetrable heavenly heights." Daniel Boorstin   "Neither 'available' resources nor the 'existing' needs are objective facts in the sense of those which the engineer deals in his limited field: they can never be directly known in all relevant detail to a single planning body. Resources and needs exist for practical purposes only through somebody knowing about them, and there will always be infinitely more known to all the people together than can be known to the most competent authority. A successful solution can therefore not be based on the authority dealing directly with the objective facts, but must be based on a method of utilising the knowledge dispersed among all members of society, knowledge of which in any particular instance the central authority will usually know neither who possesses it nor whether it exists at all." Friedrich Hayek   "In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension. This is because of a central diktat that Maori knowledge must be given equal status to other forms of knowledge, including science. Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks 'with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics' notes disapprovingly that 'pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.'" John Armstrong   "Perhaps it is only natural that in the exuberance generated by the successful advances of science the circumstances which limit our factual knowledge, and the consequent boundaries imposed upon the applicability of theoretical knowledge, have been rather disregarded. It is high time, however, that we take our ignorance more seriously." Friedrich Hayek   "If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization." Friedrich Hayek   "No tutor would accept from a pupil the reasons given by Plato for the following quite important doctrines: that the Soul is tri-partite; that if the Soul is tri-partite, the ideal society would be a three-class state; that whatever exists, exists to perform one and only one function; that reason is one such function; that one and only one of the classes should be taught to reason; that membership of a class should normally be determined by pedigree; that empirical science can never be 'real' science; that there are Forms; that only knowledge of Forms is 'real science'; that only those who have this knowledge can have good political judgement; that political institutions must degenerate unless there are rulers who have had the sort of education that Plato describes; that 'justice' consists in doing one's own job; and so on." Gilbert Ryle   "He had a deep contempt for politics and politicians. Politics, he maintained, was the curse of the modern age, as religion was of ages past. Just think of the sheer quantity of human misery caused by politics in this century—in Central Europe, Russia, China, Africa—he would urge rhetorically. Are you an anarchist, then, she asked. But of course he wasn't. He seemed to have a rather old-fashioned Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of society through the application of science. He made a stark opposition between the pursuit of knowledge, which was science, and the pursuit of power, which was politics. All forms of pseudo-knowledge, from divinity to deconstruction, he maintained, had to impose their false world pictures on others by becoming political." David Lodge   "For all his sympathy for the plight of the enslaved African, the persecuted Amerindians, and his professed admiration for the Hottentots (whom he supposed had only one testicle), Diderot had little sympathy for what Voltaire scoffingly called 'the nostalgia for the Neolithic.' He knew what a life of squalor, disease, and deprivation in fact lay behind all the expurgated, eroticized versions of the savage life, and he had no desire to shed the arts and sciences, any more than he had a desire to shed his clothes. The 'savage,' for all his other merits, could have 'no knowledge of generosity or knowledge of those other virtues which have developed over a long time among civilized nations through the refinement of custom (moral).' From his writing-desk he could see very clearly that even within Europe, beset as it was by a miserable populous concerned exclusively with survival and the restrictive power of established religion, 'the progress of enlightenment is limited.' But he also knew that beyond the frontiers of the civilized world no enlightenment was possible at all. For, in the end, the attainment of a true 'civilization' was all that 'Enlightenment' was about." Anthony Pagden   "Half a century ago, Daniel Bell recognized an emerging 'knowledge class,' composed of people whose status rested on educational attainment and access to knowledge in a post-industrial society. Theoretically it represented a meritocracy, but this class has become mostly hereditary, as well-educated people, particularly from elite colleges, marry each other and aim to perpetuate their status. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 48 percent. As Bell observed, parents of high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children's prospects, and in this way, 'after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.'" Joel Kotkin   "Van Leenhof, holding that reason, and not hereditary principle or tradition, must be the exclusive basis of political legitimacy, maintains that 'everything is good insofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everything else being slavery under the appearance of government.' 'Knowledge of matters' he considers the only light by which we can proceed in debate about politics and the exclusive aid to adjusting our lives to the 'nature of God's order and guidance,' a typical Spinozist usage, later Morelly's l'ordre de la nature, denoting the fixed and rational structure of reality and Man's place in it. Conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, as in everything else, in van Leenhof's opinion, 'the root of all evil.' Reason and 'wisdom,' he adds, again employing the populist Spinozist phraseology he had coined, as well as being the key to assessing everything in politics is the path 'whereby we share in God's nature, the highest human good and happiness.'" Jonathan Israel   "Just as will and ethics collapse all binaries, I wish to collapse the binaries of natural life and death insofar as they are usually correlated with affirmation and negation by proposing that the death of the human species is the most life-affirming event that could liberate the natural world from oppression, and our death could be an act of affirmative ethics which would far exceed any localized acts of compassion because those acts will be bound by human contracts, social laws and the prevalent status of beings, things and their placement within knowledge." Patricia MacCormack   "The text doesn't reveal its secrets just by being stared at. It reveals its secrets to those who already pretty much know what secrets they expect to find. Texts are always packed, by the reader's prior knowledge and expectations, before they are unpacked. The teacher has already inserted into the hat the rabbit whose production in the classroom awes the undergraduates." Louis Menand