... "No, that's not about us. How about this: 'man, as opposed to animals, is a creature with an undefinable need for knowledge'? I read that somewhere." "So have I," said Valentine. "But the whole problem with that is that the average man -- the one you have in mind when you talk about 'us' and 'not us' -- very easily manages to overcome this need for knowledge. I don't believe that need even exists. There is a need to understand, and you don't need knowledge for that. The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn't require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas pins so-called intuition and so-called common sense." ...
Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky