There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
I know only that I do not know.
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world..

Name	Socrates
Life	470 - 399 BC
Country	Greece
Category	Wisdom
Wikipedia	>>

The trouble with philosophers is that they question everything, but answer nothing. On the basis of his enormous respect for knowledge, Socrates questioned the wisdom of the rulers of Athens. Rulers are normally guided by adrenalinomania. They prefer prostration to protests, as Socrates got to know. In his saying that he only knew that he didn't know anything, he also implied that the rulers didn't know anything for sure, either. Which was, and is, true. Rulers, however, consider such attitudes insolent, especially in front of judges. Socrates was sentenced to death. In dying, he created the first systematic Western philosophy through his pupil, Plato and, later, Aristotle. Someone who wants to understand society can honestly say that however much more he knows, he doesn't know anything for sure. But a few things we do know. In the physical sciences there is, for instance, "no dissent from the proposition that the properties of large objects are consequences of the properties of the atoms of which they consist", says a respected scientist. Society is a "large object". It is formed of the atoms of small men and women. The wisdom of Delphi told us to "know ourselves".

How much do we really know about ourselves today? A human being is built, we now know, by over three billion segments on our DNA-spirals. They contain some 100,000 clusters of segments called genes. These have millions of variations, called alleles or "snips". Two unrelated individuals have about three million different DNA-segments. The genes produce a few hundred thousand different proteins which, in an infinite mixture of juices, produce each one of us as a unique individual. However impressive this may sound, it is still a very general knowledge, something like knowing which color an artist has on his palette, which in no way helps us to know which painting will result. It is still an almost "know nothing"! It is even more complicated. The proteins form about one trillion different cells or neurons in our brains and nervous systems. They are connected by literally innumerable things like synapses and axons and dendrites. An extremely hard life in a laboratory might come up to ten million minutes. If such a scientist were able to study 100,000 neurons per minute, he might, towards the end of his life, be justified to say he well knew at least one individual. Socrates wanted to be a member of the world society. He did right! But not even he could imagine how immensely difficult it is to know even oneself, not to speak of the six billion individuals who now form our global society.