Evaluating Sources Quotes

You don't want to believe everything you hear.

Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

I like to go back over history and check out what people have written and whether I agree with it or not.

Children should be taught to question everything . . . everything they read and everything they hear.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.

It's a good thing I don't read everything Eddie says, or I'd be up in arms and not enjoying my life.

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

We all have to be, as consumers of information and news, we have to be a little more circumspect. And let's not take everything in that gets fed to us.

Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.