Jack Abbott
Jack Abbott

The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it becomes the Ancestor. Words and Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals

of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity.

Jack Abbott
Jack Abbott

Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The foremost challenge is that of the knowledge revolution. Economic power will depend on creativity and innovation. Creation of wealth will move from traditional resources to the one asset: knowledge.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The information revolution will lead us through a knowledge revolution to the wisdom revolution.

Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker

The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined

contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening

spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

Analysis of a system reveals its structure and how it works. It provides the knowledge required to make it work efficiently and to repair it when it stops working. Its product is know-how, knowledge, not understanding. To enable a system to perform effectively we must understand it—we must be able to explain its behavior—and this requires being aware of its functions in the larger systems of

which it is a part.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

Knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it's intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone "memorizes" information (as less-aspiring test-bound students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton

It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which, as the earthly wants and the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark

of history.

John Adams
John Adams

The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.