How It's Used

“U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left.”

"Nobody knows anything, although some know-nothings know more than others. The economy is a stalwart, a shambles, or some combination of the two. The pronouncements and analogies fly: we’ve reached the end of a sixty-year cycle, or a twenty-five-year cycle, or a six-year cycle, or the end of nothing."

"What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: 'Real men don’t think things through.'"

"It was a field of 164 -- one of the smallest of the World Series -- but everywhere I looked were legendary names: Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, Scotty Nguyen, Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel. Somehow, they stabled all the donkeys at my table -- I guess they didn't want the stench of our play to contaminate the rest of the room -- so we were a bunch of know-nothings hoping to make something."

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