Print
The Unknown
April 9, 2009 – 10:02 pm by Lance MichalsonAs we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
The exact words of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as taken from the official transcripts of the US Department of Defense.
Similar:
- Privacy law fast tracked
- Current status of the PPI Bill
- Get limited liability
- The readability statistics of a document
- Plain legal language - some quick wins
One Response to “The Unknown”
Try these quotes for size!
“We are too narrow-minded a species to consider the possibility of events straying from our mental projection, but furthermore, we are too focused on matters internal to the project to take into account external uncertainty, the ‘unknown unknown’, so to speak, the contents of the unread books.”
Quote from p 157 of “The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb published by Penguin Books in 2008.
“You must know, then, that when our gentleman had nothing to do … he passed his time in reading books of knight-errantry, which he did with that application and delight, … but among them all, none pleased him like the works of the famous Feliciana de Sylva; for the clearness of his prose, and those intricate expressions with which it is interlaced, seemed to him so many pearls of eloquence, especially when he came to read the challenges, and the amorous addresses, many of them in this extraordinary style : ‘The reason of your unreasonable usage of my reason, does so enfeeble my reason, that I have reason to expostulate with your beauty’”.
Quote from Part I of “The History of Don Quixote” by Cervantes (text edited by FW Clark) published by Cassell, Petter, and Galpin in about 1870.
By Graham Giles on Apr 23, 2009