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Education Quote by John Kluge

"You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind"

About this Quote

Kluge’s line reads like a rebuke to the modern habit of outsourcing our thinking. “You should have a fund of knowledge” isn’t just a call to be informed; it’s a demand for ballast. A “fund” implies something accumulated, diversified, and hard-earned - not a hot take, not a feed, not a borrowed certainty. Then comes the pivot: “out of that you make up you mind.” The phrase insists that judgment is a personal responsibility, built from stored understanding rather than vibe, tribe, or convenience.

The intent is practical, even managerial: decisions should be anchored in substance. Coming from John Kluge - a billionaire media executive who built Metromedia across broadcasting and telecommunications - the subtext is sharpened by irony. His wealth was tied to the very machinery that can flood the public with information while thinning out comprehension. In that light, the quote doubles as a warning about his own industry’s byproducts: noise masquerading as knowledge, speed replacing synthesis.

There’s also a quiet ethic of self-reliance here. Kluge isn’t selling genius or intuition; he’s describing a workmanlike process: gather, store, evaluate, decide. It’s the mindset of a businessman who learned that “being opinionated” is cheap, but being right is expensive. The cultural context now makes it land harder: we’re drowning in content and starving for frameworks. Kluge’s prescription is almost unfashionably slow - and that’s why it still stings.

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TopicKnowledge
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Kluge, John. (2026, January 16). You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-should-have-a-fund-of-knowledge-of-something-106763/

Chicago Style
Kluge, John. "You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-should-have-a-fund-of-knowledge-of-something-106763/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-should-have-a-fund-of-knowledge-of-something-106763/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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You should have a fund of knowledge of something - John Kluge
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About the Author

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John Kluge (September 21, 1914 - September 7, 2010) was a Businessman from Germany.

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