A Quote by Will Durant
We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
Related Quotes
Whenever I visit an industrialized nation that isn't the United States, it immediately becomes apparent how much more educated and informed and aware of international events their citizens are compared to Americans.
. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Man is unable to accurately predict events which are but twenty-four hours distant; only the Divine Mind could have foretold the future, centuries before it came to be. Hence, we affirm with the utmost confidence, that the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies in the Bible attest and demonstrate the truth that the Scriptures are the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God.
Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can't have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.
The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.
There are certain things in this world we all have in common such as time. Everybody has sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours to a day. The difference is what we do with that time and how we use it.
President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln's phrase, referred to America as 'the last, best hope of man on Earth.' But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.
Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
The best predictor of future events is probably past events.
When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events.
If people are informed they will do the right thing. It's when they are not informed that they become hostages to prejudice.
What we need more than anything else is an informed populace. I believe people want to be informed.
Democracy depends on citizens being informed, and since our media, especially television (which is the most important source of news for most Americans) reports mostly what the people in power do, and repeats what the people in power say, the public is badly informed, and it means we cannot really say we have a functioning democracy.
The qualifying system helps the top guys like Sergio Garcia, who play most of their golf in the U.S. They can rely on the world rankings and just play their four extra events [with the four majors and three World Golf Championship events counting as seven European events]. But for the other guys it's tough, and I don't know if that can be changed. It is a tricky situation.
I've always wanted to do more significant stuff. I think of myself as well-informed, but the hardest thing to do is talk about politics and current events and be funny and not just preachy.
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