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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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Albert J. Nock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1870
Born: October 13
Died: 1945
Died: August 19
Autobiographer
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Common
Error
May
Remembered
Kind
Useful
Thinking
Errors
Prevalence
Worth
Accounted
Perhaps
Pedants
Learning
Pedantry
Knowledge
Largely

More quotes by Albert J. Nock

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Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.
Albert J. Nock
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In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
Albert J. Nock
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The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
Albert J. Nock
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The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
Albert J. Nock
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When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.
Albert J. Nock
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The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use.
Albert J. Nock
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You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.
Albert J. Nock
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There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
Albert J. Nock
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The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
Albert J. Nock
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As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
Albert J. Nock
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The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power.
Albert J. Nock
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For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to.
Albert J. Nock
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The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.
Albert J. Nock
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Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.
Albert J. Nock
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It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.
Albert J. Nock
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The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.
Albert J. Nock
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Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
Albert J. Nock
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Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.
Albert J. Nock
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The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.
Albert J. Nock
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The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.
Albert J. Nock