Bernays was seized with the idea that the hidden forces acting within individuals, and more important, within crowds of them, could be hijacked.

Is knowledge important? Cultural knowledge lies at the very center of one of the most notorious geopolitical disputes of the last century.

They survived because they had the knowledge that had been handed down to them through generations past.

We get an independent standard only if we bring in continuous interaction among individuals, that is, if we bring in the community.

People move about and live their lives within social contexts and institutions, not as lone individuals—not ever as lone individuals.

A culture in which individual judgement is largely suspended is corrupt. But the cure for this malady is not conceptual revision. The concept of knowledge is what it is come what may, and it is indispensable.

Each of us can benefit from observations and discoveries made by other people and we can share information to our mutual advantage.

The sharing of knowledge creates a new subject of knowledge: the community.

The social constitution of knowledge reveals itself beautifully, and, to all of us, obviously.

Creating placeholder structures—knowing without understanding—is central to all conceptual change.

Initial learning of new facts, by necessity, must be formulated in terms of the available conceptual repertoire, or they must be represented as placeholder structures, not yet interpreted in terms of available concepts.

Why is it that those who are regarded as having the most compassion in education say stupid, insensitive things like "the one doing the talking is the one doing the learning"?

Beyond its epistemic function of making knowledge available to the recipient, testimony is intimately tied to human sociality.

Without explanatory bootstrapping, we would not be able to establish many adaptive prior beliefs, especially those that are complex or abstract.

We may treat mathematics too specially, as being unnecessarily privileged compared to other academic disciplines or ways of knowing.

Should a wise man keep so much to his own counsel?

It's not a bad thing to accept information from others without personally vetting it or critiquing it; in fact, we really couldn't live without doing so.

How is it possible that each person's own faculties are more trustworthy than the faculties of any other person?

Unless testimony is a good source of knowledge none of us knows hardly anything.

We receive a significant amount of information from others without our awareness.