Marvin Minsky Quotes

Sometimes we think, "We're the only people who see it this way," but that's really not the case.

The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there's another view.

the best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.

The way to eliminate ignorance is through steady, focused discrimination between the observer and the world.

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.

The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it.

You'll never see it my way, because you're not me!

When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.

If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

Just when you think you know something, it gets turned around and challenged in some way. But those changes are welcome because you end up learning more.

Whatever we do, all the knowledge, the experience, they stay with us, we carry them on, use them in one way or another.

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

There is no better way to learn than to teach.

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.

There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.