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Quotations about understanding | |
He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion. We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies. Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science -- by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Though men of delicate taste be rare, they are easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their understanding, and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind. Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate or control just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside pages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. |
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