Ellen Goodman Quotes

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers— conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress.

Don't you find that the more you know, the more you don't know and can't ever learn because there's too much stuff out there?

Who would have thought around 1900 that in fifty years time we would know so much more and understand so much less.

How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledge. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.

The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.

I think I succeeded in getting the Egyptian people excited about the importance of science, and this is the only way Egypt can get out of this dark ages.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

One can not impede scientific progress.

Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.

If a more general prosperity permits a greater number of individuals to pursue studies, since at present, in the most enlightened countries, hardly a fiftieth part of those men to whom nature has given talent receive the education necessary to make use of their talents; and that, therefore, the number of men destined to push back the frontiers of the sciences by their discoveries will grow in the same proportion [as universal education increases].

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

... science is the most revolutionary force in the world.

… we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

Every year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line' through no fault of their own.

Men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

Every time I've learned something, I've realized there are a hundred more things I don't know about the thing I just learned.

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

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.

There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about.