“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.” — Benjamin Disraeli

“The multitude of books is making us ignorant.” — Voltaire

“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise.” — Oscar Wilde

“The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author, some for some kind of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise a name, others for the sake of lucre or gain.” — Martin Luther

“There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive.” — Robertson Davies

“The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.” — Bernard Shaw

“All my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific.” — Lily Tomlin

“I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the one who sold it.” — Will Rogers

“I would rather discover a single causal connection than win the throne of Persia.” — Democritus

“When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say uneventful.” — Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, in 1907

“If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” — Will Rogers

“Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” — Wernher von Braun

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” — Niels Bohr

“An expert is one who knows so much about so little that he neither can be contradicted, nor is worth contradicting.” — Henry Ward

“You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won’t; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don’t know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn’t be?” — Stephen Leacock, How to Make a Million Dollars, 1910

There was a young man of Cadiz,
Who inferred that life is what it is,
For he early had learnt,
If it were what it weren’t,
It could not be that which it is.

— J. St. Loe Strachey (editor of The Spectator)