knowns and unknowns and Confucius

The Master said, “Yu, shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; — this is knowledge.” Confucius in The Analects 2:17, as translated by Arthur Waley

Variant translation: “Yu, shall I teach you about knowledge? What you know, you know, what you don’t know, you don’t know. This is knowledge”.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge. Confucius, Analects, Book II, Chapter XVII. Cited in: Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Knowledge#Eastern_philosophy
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“There are known knowns” is a phrase from a response United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave to a question at a U.S. Department of Defense news briefing in February 2002 about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.[1]

Rumsfeld stated:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

The statement became the subject of much commentary.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

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The Unknown Known (also known as The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld) is a 2013 American documentary film about the life of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, directed by filmmaker Errol Morris.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known

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The quotes from eastern sources seem to show they are not the source of the last kind, the “unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Reason for posting: thought he might have been quoting eastern sources without giving attribution. Seems not. If he was quoting without knowing he was quoting having forgotten he had read or heard it before, it could be for him an unknown unknown, perhaps. Anyway, not quoting knowingly.