"It’s not what you don’t know that’ll hurt you, the old saying went. It’s what you do know that isn’t so."

Lois McMaster Bujold Literature See all quotes by Lois McMaster Bujold →

React to this quote

More by Lois McMaster Bujold

“Men may move mountains, but ideas move men.”

“Permanent justice is well worth a temporary offended protest, I can assure you, Lieutenant.”

“I may be small, but I screw up big because I’m standing on the shoulders of GIANTS.”

“Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention.”

“I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given. They must be taken and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can’t be gifts.”

“I’ve always felt that theists were more ruthless than atheists.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Mahmud was a man of great abilities, and is renowned as one of the greatest champions of Islam.... His influence upon Islam soon became widely known, for he converted as many as a thousand idol-temple…"

— Mahmud of Ghazni

Military971–1030

#knowledge

"Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them."

— George Eliot

Journalism1819–1880

#knowledge

"I saw a fullness, a brightness with which I felt myself so filled that words fail me, nor can I find anything to compare it with. I cannot tell you that I saw something with a bodily form, but he was …"

— Angela of Foligno

1248–1309

#knowledge

"We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half d…"

— Darius Milhaud

Music1892–1974

#knowledge