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All Albert J. Nock Quotes
I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.
Albert J. Nock
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The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.
Albert J. Nock
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The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Albert J. Nock
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Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Albert J. Nock
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The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.
Albert J. Nock
52% of people like this quote
Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
Albert J. Nock
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Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
Albert J. Nock
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Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
Albert J. Nock
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As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.
Albert J. Nock
51% of people like this quote
Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.
Albert J. Nock
51% of people like this quote
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
Albert J. Nock
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Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks.
Albert J. Nock
49% of people like this quote
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
Albert J. Nock
49% of people like this quote
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
Albert J. Nock
48% of people like this quote
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