An interesting way to look at this is to imagine a small white circle of knowledge surrounded by the blackness of the unknown. The circumference of that circle indicates the amount of knowledge that we can see we do not know and which we, in our curiosity, investigate. Once we have found out these unknown areas, the white circle grows larger ... and larger ... and larger. So too does the circumference of the circle, until eventually we realise that the more we know, the more we know that we do not know.

It's a bit much to ask of our present government.

The slogan is mostly attributed to Socrates as a paraphrase but who knows. It’s a convenient slogan to put into Socrates’ mouth.

It’s a truism regardless!

No shit republicans would have a heart attack if they had to admit to real scientific facts instead of lies

What they need above all is a dose of reality, not philosophy. Realism and compromise is what is needed to do any deal, Mrs.May and the EU had already done all the negotiations, the deal she got is the best deal possible, and the Irish Backstop has to be part of it, Boris’s assertion that he could get a better one, and a removal of the backstop was always a lie, the Tories voted him in as PM on that lie because they believed that by his sheer force of personality he’d get the EU to bend his will. Rory Stewart said it was an impossibility, I knew it was an impossibility, Boris knew it was an impossibility too, but he never intended to reopen negotiations....all the time pretending to do so, when a no deal Brexit was what he really intended to get. I think today for the first time he is beginning to realise that he and Cummings are not just going to get everything they want, and that the strength of feeling against a no deal is much greater that they anticipated.

With regards to the expression which you heard on TV this morning....I do agree that it sounds a bit like an Irishism. My best friend, who sadly died a few years ago, and whom was from a very small rural community here in the middle of Ulster....once said to me “I’m clever enough to know that I don’t know very much”. She was referring to the fact that unlike me she had never had much education,...having had to leave school at an early age because her mother died when she was 13, and her father needed her to look after the home and several younger sisters. She was actually really very intelligent and had great instincts and common sense, qualities which I recognised in her as soon as we met. She once or twice told me that she thought I was much too clever to be friends with someone so lacking in knowledge, but I reassured her that it was only lack of educational opportunity that had stopped her from having a better education, and that she was not in any way intellectually inferior to me. I think that either her remark or the one you refer to would make an excellent choice as a slogan.

You can lead horses to water, but you can not make them drink. And it is almost certain that politicians see science as a threat to their power.