John Perry Barlow Quotes

It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.

It will never be possible to eliminate the fact that human beings have different levels of knowledge and consciousness

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

The establishment of a republican government without well-appointed and efficient means for the universal education of the people is the most rash and foolhardy experiment ever tried by man.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

I don't believe there is one woman within the confines of this state who does not believe in birth control. I never met one. That is, I never met one who thought that she should be kept in ignorance of contraceptive methods. Many I have met who valued the knowledge they possessed, but thought there were certain other classes who would be better kept in ignorance. The old would protect the young. The rich would keep the poor in ignorance. The good would keep their knowledge from the bad, the strong from the weak.

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

I willingly speak to those who know, but for those who do not know I forget.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

It really is disgusting when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions.

It's one of my biggest internal struggles - the whole schooling system in London and the fact that my kids are going to a posh school. It freaks me out.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America.

Philosophers see no harm in the Jesuits other than in their effect on humanity and the sciences. The vulgar and especially the prejudiced only hate them from an envy and jealousy born out of conspiracy and intrigue at an organisation which overshadows them.

Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.

The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

The education that you give to the upper classes will not uproot idolatry and prejudice, for it is amongst the masses that the error and prejudice will always maintain their power, and while you do not uproot those prejudices from the hearts of the masses, a handful of educated Hindus will never be able successfully to reform the country.