Daniel Boorstein and knowledge

Daniel Boorstein (1914-1987) was an American historian best known for serving at the Library of Congress. The rest of this post is some quotes from Boorstein.

1. "Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude." (The Lost Wold of Thomas Jefferson, 1948)

2. "It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality." (The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1961)

3. "In the last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo-events." (The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1961)

4. "While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous." (Gresham's Law: Knowledge or Information? 1979)

5. "The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory." (The Discoverers, 1983)

6. "The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer." (AZQuotes.com)

Octavio Paz and language

Octavio  Paz (1914-1998) was a Mexican writer and received the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature. The rest of this post is some quotes from Paz.

1. "The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and corrupting us... Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear." (The Monkey Grammarian, 1974)

2. "Language lies outside society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops." (Alternating Current, 1973)