Awake For Freedom's Sake by Leonard E. Read

Author:Leonard E. Read
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-61016-578-5
Published: 1977-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Vanity makes men ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.

—Bulwer-Lytton

When a man has no longer any conception of excellence above his own, his voyage is done; he is dead; dead in the trespasses and sins of blear-eyed vanity.

—Henry Ward Beecher

If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.

—La Rochefoucauld

Now and then throughout history, even before Socrates, there emerge individuals who recognize this fact, who have an awareness of one of life’s most rewarding truths: the more one knows, the greater looms the unknown! The more wisdom, the more is one’s ignorance recognized. A simple demonstration of this truth, one I like to repeat, was made by the noted mathematician, Warren Weaver:

As science learns one answer, it is characteristically true that it learns several new questions. It is as though science were working in a great forest of ignorance within which . . . things are clear. . . . But, as that circle becomes larger and larger, the circumference of contact with ignorance also gets longer and longer. Science learns more and more. But there is a sense in which it does not gain; for the volume of the apprehended but not understood keeps getting larger. We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our ignorance.1

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