Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds ' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

I thought they may have presumed too much knowledge of certain things for people who are not comedians. Like Montreal. A comic understands what it is and its importance but someone else may not know about it.

To express the same idea in still another way I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Our problem from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

Hitherto I have courted Truth with a kind of Romantick Passion in spite of all Difficulties and Discouragements: for knowledge is thought so unnecessary an Accomplishment for a Woman that few will give themselves the Trouble to assist us in the Attainment of it.

We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us and the more we gain the more is our desire the more we see the more we are capable of seeing.

I had a non-existent knowledge of Queen Victoria's early years. Like everyone else I thought of her as an old lady dressed in black. My mom had told me about her though that she had a very loving relationship with Albert that they had lots of kids and that he died young.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly if not explicitly systematic theory in this sense.