22 Quotes by Ian Leslie

Ignorance as a deliberate choice, can be used to reinforce prejudice and discrimination.

Humans became the only species to acquire guidance on how to live from the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors, rather than just from their DNA.

[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

... knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge.

It's only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are.

Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.

I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.

There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point, as everyone from Galileo to Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs could have attested.

We know that new ideas often come from the cross-fertilisation of different fields, occurring in the mind of a widely knowledgeable person.