Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right.

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

I am a firm believer that if you can explain it to a kid, you're on the right track.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound.

An expert knows all the answers - if you ask the right questions.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Every single day, I'm curious about everything. Curiosity is finding answers to things.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.