“There are young men and women up and down the land
who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an
academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed
with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any
amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in
those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to
hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same.
Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You
barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason
people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are
incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”—British
actor and author Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
(2012)
(Photo of Stephen
Fry taken on June 15, 2016, at Winfield House, by the US Embassy London.)
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