George Akerlof Quotes

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

I decided in my late teens that I wanted to be an actor, and my dad and I agreed that films were better. I work alongside my dad, you see. I've thought that films were better since I was a kid.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

If you don't want to be a teacher, you'd better get off this planet.

The Fox knows many things-the hedgehog one big one.

A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

It may be said "In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.

...I spent many, many hours in...libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

To start with, look at all the books.

There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.

Anything worth anything can be found in books.

The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.

Knowing is NOT the most important thing. To be able to FIND OUT is more important than knowing.

Don't write about that which you don't know.

Become as knowledgeable as possible.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can't be too narrow on science.