Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

There are no national frontiers to learning.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.

Nations are not thugs. They are bodies of intelligent people.

Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.

There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.

Seriously, I feel more like a revolutionary because the final goal is not only to download all the articles and books and give open access to them, but to change legislation is such a way that free distribution of research papers will not face any legal obstacles.

I want to collect the entire range of scientific and educational literature and make it accessible to the whole world. Just like Google Books, but maybe in a more ambitious way.

Of course there should be training sessions open to the public, but not always.

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

People seem very arrogant when they say 'I'm right and you're wrong', but in practice we all believe we're right. We have a staggering arrogance in our own belief. That can be tempered by not being 100% certain; by being provisional. No matter what the debate is, very few people have the modesty to suspend judgement on a whole range of things; most intelligent people have an opinion and are expected to have an opinion by other people - but it always requires making a personal judgement that goes way-beyond your expertise. We do it all the time.

America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them.

An intelligent person hires people who are more intelligent than he is.

Hollywood is not stupid, contrary to popular belief; it's really a lot of intelligent people trying to figure things out.

Make information free for all.

And therefore only the enlightened sovereign and the worthy general who are able to use the most intelligent people as agents are certain to achieve great things.

The biggest reason people don't succeed is because they don't expose themselves to existing information.

Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.

We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

There are a few things that tend to infuriate me. One is ignorance, because I have become accustomed to speaking to very intelligent people like Gore Vidal and Al Franken on a regular basis, since dating Bill Maher.