General Knowledge Quotes

• And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

  John Adams

  Education, Character, Mean

  John Adams (2004). “The Portable John Adams”, p.219, Penguin

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

  John Adams

  Education, Freedom, Knowledge

  'A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law' (1765)

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view... The best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.

  Nikola Tesla

  Ignorance, Views, Appreciate

  "The Transmission Of Electrical Energy Without Wires As A Means For Furthering Peace". "Electrical World and Engineer", (pp. 21-24), January 7, 1905.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

  John Locke

  Philosophical, Knowledge, Science

  'An Essay concerning Human Understanding' (1690) bk. 2, ch. 1, sect. 19

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you look at the people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge. They don't have a really narrowly focused education.

  Larry Page

  Impact, People, Looks

  6 Copy quote

• To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledge are those knowledge that idiots possess.

  William Blake

  Merit, Idiot, Distinction

  "Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds" (ca. 1798 - 1809)

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

  John Millington Synge

  Islands, Wind, Enough

  John Millington Synge (1999). “The Aran Islands”, p.26, Northwestern University Press

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

  Orson Scott Card

  Stupid, Class, Careers

  66 Copy quote

• For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Would Be, Literature, Study

  Lafcadio Hearn (2012). “Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn”, p.105, tredition

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Knowledge, May, Peril

  5 Copy quote

• General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.

  William Blake

  Idiot

  "Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds" (ca. 1798 - 1809)

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

  Margaret Atwood

  School, People, Different

  10 Copy quote

• Now, I have to - in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who - many of whom who've died of emphysema since we were shooting.

  Haskell Wexler

  Cowboy, Mind, Defense

  "Remembering Oscar-Winning Cinematographer Haskell Wexler". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is general knowledge for anyone interested in color that subdued value, intensity and hue make for quieter, less adventuresome interiors. Stronger approaches need stronger knowledge, more experience and flair.

  Van Day Truex

  Color, Design, Stronger

  4 Copy quote