KNOWELEDGE IS POWER
Scientia potentia est
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sir Francis Bacon, "ipsa scientia potestas est" (knowledge itself is power). Meditationes Sacrae (1597).
The phrase "scientia potentia est" (or "scientia est potentia"[p] or also "scientia potestas est") is a Latin aphorism often claimed to mean organized "knowledge is power". It is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, where the expression "ipsa scientia potestas est" ('knowledge itself is power') occurs in Bacon's Meditationes Sacrae (1597). The phrase "scientia potentia est" was written in the 1658 work De Homine by Thomas Hobbes, who was secretary to Bacon as a young man.
The related phrase "sapientia est potentia" is often translated as "wisdom is power".
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Origins and parallels
3 Interpretation
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
History[edit]
There is no known occurrence of this precise phrase in Bacon's English or Latin writings. However, this phrase does appear in Thomas Hobbes' 1658 work De Homine, cap. x : "Scientia potentia est, sed parva; quia scientia egregia rara est, nec proinde apparens nisi paucissimis, et in paucis rebus. Scientiae enim ea natura est, ut esse intelligi non possit, nisi ab illis qui sunt scientia praediti.
This was translated as "The sciences, are small power; because not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man; nor are at all, but in a few, and in them, but of a few things. For science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attained it" in Thomas Hobbes, The English Works, vol. III (Leviathan) [1651] in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart., (London: Bohn, 1839–45). 11 vols. Vol. 3. p 47. This passage from Chapter X ("Of power, worth, dignity, honour, and worthiness" occurs in a list of various attributes of man which constitute power; in this list, "sciences" or "the sciences" are given a minor position.
It is asserted that Hobbes also wrote "The end of knowledge is power ... the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action or thing to be done. " in De Corp, EW, i, I, 1, 6, 7. According to Thomas Hobbes,[1] "In Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the social contract tradition (1988), 46. Hampton indicates that this quote is 'after Bacon' and in a footnote, that 'Hobbes was Bacon's secretary as a young man and had philosophical discussions with him (Aubrey 1898, 331).
The closest expression in Bacon's works is, perhaps, the expression "scientia potestas est", found in his Meditationes Sacrae (1597), which is perhaps better translated as "knowledge is His power", because the context of the sentence refers to the qualities of God and is imbedded in a discussion of heresies that deny the power of God: Dei quam potestatis; vel putius ejus partis potestatis Dei, (nam et ipsa scientia potestas est) qua scit, quam ejus qua raovet et agit; ut praesciat quaedam otoise, quae non praedestinet et praordinet.
The English translation of this section includes the following:
"This canon is the mother of all canons against heresies. The cause of error is twofold : ignorance of the will of God, and ignorance or superficial consideration of the power of God. The will of God is more revealed through the Scriptures… his power more through his creatures… So is the plenitude of God’s power to be asserted, as not to involve any imputation upon his will. So is the goodness of his will to be asserted, as not to imply any derogation of his power.
"… Atheism and Theomachy rebels and mutinies against the power of God ; not trusting to his word, which reveals his will, because it does not believe in his power,to whom all things are possible… But of the heresies which deny the power of God, there are, besides simple atheism, three degrees…
"The third degree is of those who limit and restrain the former opinion to human actions only, which partake of sin: which actions they suppose to depend substantively and without any chain of causes upon the inward will and choice of man; and who give a wider range to the knowledge of God than to his power; or rather to that part of God’s power (for knowledge itself is power) whereby he knows, than to that whereby he works and acts ; suffering him to fore know some things as an unconcerned looker on, which he does not predestine and preordain : a notion not unlike the figment which Epicurus introduced into the philosophy of Democritus, to get rid of fate and make room for fortune; namely the sidelong motion of the Atom; which has ever by the wiser sort been accounted a very empty device. " (p. 94-95; Works of Bacon, Vol XIV, Boston; Brown and Taggard, 1861)
Interpretation of the notion of power meant by Bacon must therefore take into account his distinction between the power of knowing and the power of working and acting, the opposite of what is assumed when the maxim is taken out of context.[2] Indeed, the quotation has become a cliche.
In another place, Bacon wrote, "Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule."[3] a
Origins and parallels[edit]
Information Awareness Office seal with its motto scientia est potentia
A proverb in practically the same wording is first found in Hebrew, in the Biblical Book of Proverbs (24:5): גֶּבֶר-חָכָם בַּעוֹז; וְאִישׁ-דַּעַת, מְאַמֶּץ-כֹּחַ, translated (in the KJV) as A wise man is strong, a man of knowledge increaseth strength.
This early 1st millennium BC sentence became considerably widespread, as witnessed by a reference (around 1000 AD) in Ferdowsi's Shahname: توانا بود هر که دانا بود "One who has wisdom is powerful"[4] - and by Bacon's wording (although whether he was deliberately quoting Proverbs cannot be determined - cf. Vulgate vir sapiens et fortis est et vir doctus robustus et validus).
Interpretation[edit]
The phrase implies that with knowledge or education one's potential or abilities in life will certainly increase. Having and sharing knowledge is widely recognised as the basis for improving one's reputation and influence, thus power. This phrase may also be used as a justification for a reluctance to share information when a person believes that withholding knowledge can deliver to that person some form of advantage. Another interpretation is that the only true power is knowledge, as everything (including any achievement) is derived from it.
See also[edit]
Information warfare
Intelligence (information gathering)
Rationality and power
References[edit]
[p] ^ The phrase "scientia est potentia" is pronounced as "skee-En-tee-ah est paw-Ten-tee-ah".[5]
^ "Thomas Hobbes Quotes - 14 Science Quotes - Dictionary of Science Quotations and Scientist Quotes". Todayinsci.com. 2012-01-19. Retrieved 2012-09-20.
^ Vickers, Brian (1992). "Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge". Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (3): 495–518. JSTOR 2709891.
^ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Part I, Aphorism III. Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1863, volume VIII, p.67-68.
^ "The Modern Magazine for Persian Weddings, Cuisine, Culture & Community". Persianmirror.com. Retrieved 2012-09-20.
^ Eugene Ehrlich (1993). AMO AMAS AMAT & More. p. 255. Retrieved 2013-06-03.
Further reading[edit]
Haas, Ernst B. When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. University of California, 1990. ISBN 0-520-06646-4.
Higdon, Lee. "Knowledge is power." University Business, September 2005.
Higdon argues that because the U.S. economy is a knowledge economy the decline in enrollment of non-U.S. students in U.S. universities "has serious long-term implications for the United States."
"Knowledge is power (But only if you know how to acquire it)." The Economist, May 8, 2003.
A report on corporate knowledge management.
Peterson, Ryan. "Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge." Colorado State University Resource Centre for Communications Studies.
An exploration of what Peterson terms Foucault's "new model of the relations of power and knowledge" that contradicts Bacon.
Powers, Rod. "Knowledge is power in the military." U.S. Military: The Orderly Room.
An anecdotal argument that in the military, a person with the most rank is not always the one in charge of a given situation, but that the person with the "real power" is the person who knows the regulations.
Trump, Donald J. "Use Knowledge to Your Advantage." Trump University.
Trump argues that knowledge is one of the main secrets to success.
In a move inspired by the IRS’ scrutiny of the tea party and other nonprofit groups, the Olympia-based Freedom Foundation has filed records requests with four Washington state agencies asking for employee emails and other records containing certain words, including “tea party,” “Catholic,” “Mormon” and “redneck.”
The requests were filed in May. Representatives of the libertarian-style think tank say they are looking for evidence of bias toward the public and regulated organizations.
“We tried to come up with terms that we thought would be logical to be used in correspondence about possibly targeted groups,’’ Glen Morgan, property-rights director for the nonprofit organization, which has a hard-right reputation for its battles over land-use limits in environmentally sensitive zones and its perennial criticism of government regulations and spending.
The Freedom Foundation was not caught up in the IRS tax controversy, but its state-agency project “was an outgrowth of that,” Morgan said.
“People complain about bias all the time — it doesn’t always mean it’s true,” he said. “People on both ends of the political spectrum complain about it.”
The search is for all documents created since January 2010. The search terms also include: gun nut, NRA, Freedom Foundation, libertarian, conservative, Catholic, Christian, right wing, far right, racist, teabagger and hicks.
Officials at the affected agencies — Ecology, Revenue, Puget Sound Partnership and Labor & Industries — have been working with the think tank to narrow its requests. None could say how many emails might be reviewed.
Puget Sound Partnership, an agency of 42 employees, has already provided some documents. Ecology’s first batch of responsive emails from its 1,500 employees will be handed over July 18, according to emails it sent The Freedom Foundation. Revenue plans to disclose its first installment of documents from more than 1,000 employees by Aug. 30, but it could take a year or more to be fully responsive, a spokeswoman said.
Ecology spokeswoman Sandi Peck said every one of Ecology’s staffers must individually search emails for the 18 terms covering the period from January 2010 to May 15, 2013 – which she said is when the records request was submitted.
“It’s going to take time, but we can’t charge for staff time. This is part of the system’’ of disclosure, Peck said. “We take the public disclosure requests seriously. It’s finding that balance of needing to be complete, having that other work to do, being efficient and producing the records as quickly as possible.’’
Morgan said the records request should not be burdensome given that technology makes it fairly easy to search electronic documents for specific terms.
It is too early to say what the requests will turn up, because most documents have not been turned over yet, he said. Morgan did not give details but indicated there are references in some of the released emails to Catholics and Mormons, which he painted as derogatory…
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Content Knowledge Is Power
By Sara Wachter-BoettcherApril 29th, 2013 Content, Tools, Web Design 7 Comments
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“Content matters!” “Comp with real copy!” “Have a plan!” By now, you’ve probably heard the refrain: making mobile work is hard if you don’t consider your content. But content knowledge isn’t just about ditching lorem ipsum in a couple of comps.
Countless organizations now have a decade or two’s worth of Web content — content that’s shoved somewhere underneath their redesigned-nine-times home page. Content that’s stuck in the crannies of some sub-sub-subnavigation. Content that’s clogging up a CMS with WYSIWYG-generated markup.
Messy, right? Well, not as messy as it will be — because legacy content is the thing that loves to rear its ugly head late in the game, “breaking” your design and becoming the bane of your existence.
But when you take the time to understand the content that already exists, not only will you be able to ensure that it’s supported in the new design, but you’ll actually make the entire design stronger because you’ll have realistic scenarios to design with and for — not to mention an opportunity to clean out the bad outdated muck before it obscures your sparkly new design.
Today, we’re going to make existing content work for you, not against you.
What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You
When you’re working on something new and fun, ignoring the deep recesses of content is tempting. After all, you’ve got a lot to think about already: designing for touch, dealing with ever-changing screen sizes, adding geolocation features, maybe even blinging things out with a few badges.
But if content parity matters to you (and it damn well should if you care one whit about the “large and growing minority of Internet users” who always or mostly access the Web on a mobile device), then at some point you’ll have to deal with the unruly content lurking underneath your website’s neat surface.
Why? Because chances are there’ll be stuff out there that you’ve never thought about, much less designed for. And all that stuff has to go somewhere — too often, shoehorned into a layout it was never meant to inhabit, or perhaps not even migrated into a new template but instead left to wither in an outdated, mobile-unfriendly design.
Take navigation. As Brad Frost has written, designing small-screen navigation for small websites is simply tricky, any way you slice it.
Hard as it already is, it becomes downright impossible if you haven’t dealt with your legacy assets first. You’re sure to end up with problems, like a navigation system that only works for two levels of content when you actually have four levels to contend with, making all of that deeper information accessible only with hard to manage (and find) text links — or, worse, making it completely inaccessible except through search.
There’s a better way.
In The Belly Of The Beast
Mark Boulton has written eloquently on content-out design — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down. It’s excellent advice.
But if you’re trying to work with a website with thousands of URLs — or anything more than a few dozen, really — you have to ask: Which content do I design with? Unless you’re relying on infinite monkeys designing infinite layouts to create custom solutions for every single page, you’re going to have to rely on representative content: a set of content that demonstrates the variety of information that the experience needs to support.
So, how do you know what’s representative? You get your arms around the size, scope, structure and substance of your content.
Yup. It’s time for the content audit.
People have been talking about content audits and inventories for more than a decade — in fact, Jeffrey Veen wrote about them on Adaptive Path back in 2002, calling them a “mind-numbingly detailed odyssey through your web site.” At the time, people were starting to yank their websites from static hand-coded pages and pull them into content management systems, and someone needed to sit down and sort it all out.
More than a decade later, I’d say content audits are more useful than ever — but in a slightly different way. Today, a content audit isn’t just an odyssey through your website; it’s a window into your content’s nature.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
You could audit content for all kinds of things, depending on what you want to learn and be able to do with the information. Some audits focus on brand and voice consistency, others on assessing quality or identifying ROT.
There’s nothing wrong — and quite a lot right — with these priorities. But if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you can’t just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.
It’s a simple question, really: What are we publishing? If your first answer is “a page,” look again. What’s the shape of this content? What is this content most essentially? Is it an interview, a feature story, a product, a bio, a recipe, an erotic poem, a manifesto? Asking these questions will help you see the natural pieces and parts that make up the content.
When you do, you’ll have a structural model for the content that matches your users’ mental model — i.e. the way they perceive what they’re looking at and how they understand what it means.
For example, I recently worked with a large publicly traded company whose website dates back to the early aughts. After a couple of responsive microsites, they’ve caught the bug and want to update everything. Problem is, the existing website’s a mess of subdomains, redirects and thousands of pages that are nowhere near ready for flexible layouts.
Our first step was to dig deep, like a geologist — except that instead of unearthing strata of shale and sandstone marking bygone eras, we identified and documented all of the forgotten templates, lost content and abandoned initiatives we could.
We ended up with a dozen or so content types that fit pretty much anything the company was producing. Sure, we still ended up with some general “pages.” But more often than not, our audit revealed something more specific — and useful — about the content’s nature. When it didn’t, that was often a sign that the content wasn’t serving a purpose — which put it on the fast track to retirement.
Once you’ve taken stock of what you have, gotten rid of the garbage and identified the patterns, you’ll also need to decide which attributes each content type needs to include: Do articles have date stamps? Does this need a byline? What about images? Features? Benefits? Timelines? Ingredients? Pull quotes? This will enable you to turn all of those old shapeless pages — “blobs,” as Karen McGrane has so affectionately labeled them — into a system of content that’s defined and interconnected:
A content model for a recipe
This content model shows attributes for the “recipe” content type, and how recipes fit into a broader system.
Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.
Regardless of what you want to do with your content — launch a responsive website, publish to multiple websites simultaneously, extract snippets of content for the home page, reuse the content in an app, mash it up with a third party’s content — this sort of structure will make it possible, because it enables you to pick and choose which bits should go where, when.
TOOLS FOR AUDITING CONTENT
The content audit may not be new, but some tools to help you get started are. Lately, I’ve been running initial reports with the Content Analysis Tool (CAT), which, for a few bucks, produces a detailed report of every single page of content that its spiders can find across your website.
Using CAT’s Web interface, you can sift through the report and see details such as page types, titles, descriptions, images and even the content in <h1> tags — super-useful if you’re assessing content of murky origin, because a headline often gives you at least a glimmer of what a page is about.
Here’s an excerpt of what it found for Smashing Magazine’s own “Guidelines for Mobile Web Development” page:
An excerpt from the Content Analysis Tool
The CAT report shows a thumbnail of the page, as well as some data about its content. See the full screenshot for more.
While features such as screenshots of all pages and lists of links are useful for individual analysis, I prefer to export CAT’s reports into a big ol’ CSV file, where the raw data looks like this, with each row of the spreadsheet representing a single URL:
An excerpt of a raw CSV report from the Content Analysis Tool
CAT also spits out detailed CSVs chockfull of raw data about all pages of a website. See the full screenshot for all of the fields.
It’s not perfect. For example, if content’s been abandoned and removed from navigation but left floating out there in the tubes, CAT typically won’t pick it up either. And if a website’s headlines aren’t marked up using <h1> (like Smashing Magazine, which uses <h2>s), then it won’t scrape them either.
What it is great for, though, is getting a quick snapshot of an entire website. From here, I usually do the following:
Add fields for my own needs, such as qualitative rankings or keep/delete notations;
Set up filtering and sorting so that I can slice the data by whichever field I want, such as according to the section where it’s located;
Assess and rank each page according to whatever qualitative attributes we’ve settled on;
Note any patterns in the content types and structures used, as well as relationships to other content;
Define suggested meta-data types and tags that the content should have;
Use pivot tables, which summarize and sort data across multiple dimensions, to identify trends in the content.
With this, I now have both the detailed information to drive specific page-level changes and the high-level patterns to inform structural recommendations, CMS updates, meta-data schema and other efforts to improve content portability and flexibility.
I like using CAT because it was designed by and for content strategists — and improved features are rolling out all the time — but you can also use a similar tool from SEOmoz (although it tends to sell you on fancy-pants reporting features), or even grab a report from your CMS (depending on which one you use and how it collects information).
Any of these tools will help you quickly collect raw data. But remember that they’re just a head start. Nothing replaces putting your eyes — and brain — on the content.
The Secret To Scale
You don’t have to love auditing content. You certainly don’t need to develop a sick addiction to pivot tables (but it’s totally OK if you do). What you will love, I promise, is what a deep knowledge of content enables you to do: create an extensible design system that doesn’t devolve at scale.
For example, let’s look at some of the larger websites that have started using responsive design. There’s higher education, of course, where early adopters such as the University of Notre Dame were quickly followed by a rash of college websites.
What do most of these websites have in common? Two things: a lot of complex content and a responsive system that carries through to only a handful of pages, like the UCLA’s website, where the home page and a few key pages are responsive, but the deeper content is not:
UCLA’s responsive home page and non-responsive admissions page
UCLA’s home page is responsive, but most of the website, like this landing page, is not. Larger view.
Why doesn’t that design go deeper? I’d bet it’s because making a responsive website scale takes work, as Nishant Kothary summed up brilliantly in his story of Microsoft’s new responsive home page from late 2012:
“The Microsoft.com team built tools, guidelines, and processes to help localize everything from responsive images to responsive content into approximately 100 different markets… They adapted their CMS to allow Content Strategists to program content on the site.”
In other words, a home page isn’t just a home page. You have to change both your content and the jobs of the people who manage it to make it happen.
But one industry has had some luck in building responsively at scale: the media — including massive enterprises such as Time, People and, of course, the Boston Globe. These organizations manage as much or even more content than Microsoft and universities, but as publishers with a long history of creating professional, planned, organized content, they have a huge leg up: they know what they publish, whether it’s editorials or features or profiles or news briefs. Because of this, everything they publish fits into a system — making it much easier to apply responsive design patterns across all of their content.
Making Tough Choices
When you start breaking down your big, messy blobs of content and understanding how they really operate, you’ll realize there’s always more you could do: add more structure, more editing, more CMS customization. It never ends.
That’s OK.
When you understand the realities of what you’re dealing with, you’re better equipped to prioritize what you do — and what you choose not to do. You can make smart trade-offs — like deciding how much time you’re willing to invest now in order to have the flexibility to do more later, or what level of process change the current staff can handle versus the amount of flexibility you could use in the content.
There are no right answers. All we can do is find the right balance for each project, team and audience — and recognize that some structure is going to serve us a whole lot longer than none will.
Everyone’s Job
I get it. Going through endless reams of content ain’t your thing. You’re a designer, a developer, a project manager, damn it. You just want to get on with it, right?
We all do. But the more you seek to understand your content, the better your other work will be. The less often your project will go off the rails right around the time it’s supposed to launch. The fewer problems you’ll have with designs that “break” when real content gets inputted. The more the organization will be able to keep things in order after launch.
Best of all, the more your users will get the content they need — wherever and however they want it.
Thanks and credits go to Ricardo Gimenes, for preparing the front page image.
(al)
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Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Sara has an endless dedication to content that matters and partners with major brands, universities, agencies, nonprofits, and spaces in between. Most of all, she partners with clients that care about their users, their brands, and making content work for both. Follow her on Twitter.
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7 Comments
Best Comments
1
Mark LeMeriseApril 29th, 2013 4:34 pm
You wrote this article perfectly in sync with my own audit of a higher ed website, and oh boy, do they have every type of artifact under the sun: quotes, callouts, info pages, graphics of every shape and size, text walls, tables…just everything. The problem stems from the number of users in the CMS and the freedom they have to create. They don’t know any better. The CMS doesn’t know any better.
I find this problem fascinating in higher ed. You have to wrestle with thousands of pages of user-generated content and reconcile this content explosion with a responsive strategy: it’s a challenging mix of technical know-how, personnel, marketing, and often the ambiguous decision making of academia.
Personally, I have adopted an “object-oriented content” philosophy. Everyday CMS users have no say in design, layout, or formatting. Instead of creating pages that are hodgepodges of primitive objects like images and text boxes, I present a library of standard objects they can use: testimonial (quote, name, and picture), event (place, time, image, RSVP), etc. These objects make sense to everyday users, and can be made responsive.
A higher ed website is primarily a recruiting tool so the more power given to non-technical CMS users, the more power they have to dictate a marketing message.
Reply +8
2
David HobbsApril 30th, 2013 10:47 pm
Thanks for the useful post, looking at content audits from a design perspective. As someone who loves pivot tables (or other summary type tables generated from other tools), I want to come to their defense since I think in many ways the reason to do an inventory or audit is to find patterns rather than the enumerated list of content (and sometimes that enumerated list isn’t even needed).
One important aspect of content inventories and audits is the *source* of the data for the audit. Although the most-used approach is to just look at the HTML (whether manually and visually or spidered automatically by a tool), but there are other sources of data that can be merged as well (for instance, on one project I pulled in SEOMoz data, Google data, and CMS data to make ROT decisions). More on sources of data here: http://hobbsontech.com/content/rethinking-content-inventory-sources-data.
Reply +2
3
Mansoor FahmeedMay 2nd, 2013 12:47 pm
Thanks for the post. It was really helpful because It is always difficult to make something without any specific content or information of the subject.
Reply +1
4
Kenneth ElliottMay 2nd, 2013 5:28 pm
Love your post Sara! I posted on my website something identical to what you mentioned: bkreative.net/news/what-does-your-word-cloud-say-about-you. I’m trying to express to current and potential clients that the content and information on their website tells more about the back-end of their business than the design and layout. Any comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Reply +1
5
Andy Kinsey - RedstarMay 7th, 2013 11:26 am
Love the post, its worth pointing out the SEOMOz Crawl Test offers the same kind of indepth analysis of pages within a site, there is also screaming frog and a little less helpful but still free microsoft ISS SEO tools (you dont need to be running a windows server)
Reply +2
6
Rameez JavedMay 30th, 2013 3:38 pm
Thanks a lot! This detailed explanation will help me a lot in directing my approach for my organizations content development tasks!
I am impressed how deep content development goes into. The nature, effects, statistics, behavioral points that can be deduced with the content that has been put into and which can be put into for better implementation of organizational processes. It all comes down to the content portrayed right?
Thanks again! :D
Reply 0
7
ibnuJune 20th, 2013 8:09 am
Thanks for the useful post, looking at content audits from a design perspective. As someone who loves pivot tables (or other summary type tables generated from other tools), I want to come to their defense since I think in many ways the reason to do an inventory or audit is to find patterns rather than the enumerated list of content (and sometimes that enumerated list isn’t even needed).
Reply 0
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Knowledge is power (Quotation)
This phrase is often attributed to Francis Bacon, in his Meditationes Sacrae (1597).[1] Thomas Jefferson used the phrase at least twice:
"this last establishment will probably be within a mile of Charlottesville, and four from Monticello, if the system should be adopted at all by our legislature who meet within a week from this time, my hopes however are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures, the members of which do not generally possess information enough to percieve the important truths, that knolege is power, that knolege is safety, and that knolege is happiness." - Thomas Jefferson to George Ticknor, 25 November 1817[2]
"All the states but our own are sensible that knolege is power."
- Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, 22 January 1820[3]
FOOTNOTES
↑ John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 1919. The entry for this quotation is available online at http://www.bartleby.com/100/139.39.html.
↑ Polygraph copy at Historical Society.
↑ Ford, 12:155. Polygraph copy at the Library of Congress.
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