Unlearn Quotes (11 quotes)
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
Letter to George Dyer (20 Dec 1830). In Charles Lamb and Thomas Noon Talfourd (Ed.), Works: Including His Most Interesting Letters, (1867), 168.
Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
Written about 1898. Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), 346. In Mark Twain and Brian Collins (ed.), When in Doubt, Tell the Truth: and Other Quotations from Mark Twain (1996), 139.
Every so often, you have to unlearn what you thought you already knew, and replace it by something more subtle.
With co-author Jack Cohen. In Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Chap. 4, 'Science and Magic', The Science of Discworld (Rev. Ed. 2002), 14. Pratchett wrote the fantasy story told in the odd-numbered chapters. Following each, relevant real science is provided by his co-authors, Stewart and Cohen, in the even-numbered chapters (such as Chap. 4), but which of the two wrote which lines, is not designated.
Every student who enters upon a scientific pursuit, especially if at a somewhat advanced period of life, will find not only that he has much to learn, but much also to unlearn.
Outlines of Astronomy (1871), 11th edn., 1.
I learned, and later had to unlearn in order to become a scientist myself, that science is simply measurement and the answers are in print.
This View of Life: the World of an Evolutionist (1964), 27.
It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors, as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information: for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one on which we first erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds, in the same direction. Ignorance has no light, but error follows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her footsteps, has farther to go, before we can arrive at the truth, than ignorance.
Reflection 1, in Lacon: or Many things in Few Words; Addressed to Those Who Think (1820), 15.
It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.
Address at Holy Cross College (25 Jun 1919), collected in Have Faith In Massachusetts: A Collection of Speeches and Messages (1919, 2nd Ed.), 231. (This speech was not included in the period covered by the first edition.)
It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong
That learning is most requisite which unlearns evil
In Hialmer Day Gould, New Practical Spelling (1905), 14.
The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount to first principles, and take no body’s word about them.
In Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: On the Idea of a Patriot King (1749), 78.
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
In Time Enough For Love: the Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 364.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
