American - Philosopher | October 13, 1870 - August 19, 1945
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
Albert J. Nock
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Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
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Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with environment.
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Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
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It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
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The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
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Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
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As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.
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The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
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Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
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The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.
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Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.
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