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Who really said it

Knowledge itself is power

Written by Francis Bacon 1561–1626 · English philosopher, statesman & pioneer of the scientific method
Verified Free to reuse

This is genuinely Bacon. In his Meditationes Sacrae (1597), in the essay “De Hæresibus” (Of Heresies), he wrote “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est” — rendered in the standard Spedding edition as “For also knowledge itself is power.” The familiar “knowledge itself is power” is a faithful translation, the ‘itself’ carrying the Latin ipsa. The clipped three-word form “Knowledge is power” is an editors’ paraphrase, and the near-identical maxim “scientia potentia est” is Hobbes’s.

Last verified 10 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Knowledge itself is power” Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597) — "Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est" (For knowledge itself is power)

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Provenance

The source

Work
Meditationes Sacrae, essay “De Hæresibus” (Of Heresies)
First published
1597 (London)
Original Latin
“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.”
Translation
“For also knowledge itself is power” — Spedding, Ellis & Heath, The Works of Francis Bacon (1887–1901), vol. 7, p. 253

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. — For also knowledge itself is power.

The Latin ipsa (‘itself’) is what distinguishes Bacon’s phrasing; it survives in the English “knowledge itself is power.”

Bacon in Wikiquote (sourced — Meditationes Sacrae, 1597)

How we verified this

  • The line comes from Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae (1597); Wikiquote’s sourced entry gives the Latin “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est” and the English “For knowledge itself is power” — see Wikiquote.
  • The standard scholarly translation, “For also knowledge itself is power,” appears in the Spedding, Ellis & Heath edition of the collected Works (vol. 7, p. 253).
  • Bacon’s Latin ipsa scientia potestas est should not be confused with Thomas Hobbes’s later scientia potentia est (1668 Leviathan), as Wikipedia details.
Public domain

The source work, Meditationes Sacrae, was first published in 1597, and the standard English translation was published in the Spedding–Ellis–Heath edition (1887–1901) — both long before the 1931 U.S. public-domain cutoff. The wording is freely reproducible.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Fact-check

The wording, sorted out

The attribution to Bacon is correct — but two related confusions travel with this quote.

Francis Bacon (as exact wording) paraphrase

The clipped three-word slogan is an editors’ summary, not Bacon’s literal words; his phrase is the fuller ipsa scientia potestas est, “knowledge itself is power,” per todayinsci.

Thomas Hobbes different author

The near-identical Latin maxim was written by Hobbes in the 1668 Latin Leviathan (“Scientia potentia est, sed parva”) — a different phrase from Bacon’s, as Wikipedia notes.

The exact line asked about — “knowledge itself is power” — is authentically Bacon’s, from Meditationes Sacrae (1597), rendering his Latin “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.”

Context

Why it mattered

Bacon uses the phrase not as a boast about worldly command but inside a religious argument: heretics err, he says, by imagining a gap between the extent of God’s power and the extent of God’s knowledge — “for knowledge itself is power” in God, the two being one. Over the following century the line was lifted out of that theological setting and became a banner for the empirical, science-as-mastery worldview Bacon himself did so much to launch.

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Power

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Francis Bacon (sourced quotes)en.wikiquote.org

Sourced entry giving the Latin and English of the line, tied to Meditationes Sacrae (1597).
Scientia potentia esten.wikipedia.org

History of the maxim; distinguishes Bacon’s phrase from Hobbes’s later ‘scientia potentia est.’
Bacon on Knowledge (with citations)todayinsci.com

Gives the Spedding, Ellis & Heath citation (Works, vol. 7, p. 253) and notes ‘Knowledge is power’ is an editors’ summary.
Bacon writes ‘Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est’historyofinformation.com

Places the phrase in Meditationes Sacrae (1597) within the history of the ‘knowledge is power’ idea.

The author

About Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

1561–1626 · English philosopher, statesman & father of the scientific method

Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, was an English philosopher, essayist and statesman who rose to Lord Chancellor under James I. He is remembered as a founder of the empirical, experimental approach to knowledge — the “Baconian method” — set out in works such as the Novum Organum (1620). The devotional Meditationes Sacrae (1597), where this line appears, was published alongside the first edition of his celebrated Essays.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Francis Bacon, “De Hæresibus,” Meditationes Sacrae (London, 1597); trans. in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis & Douglas Denon Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (London, 1887–1901), 7:253.

MLA (9th ed.)

Bacon, Francis. “De Hæresibus.” Meditationes Sacrae, 1597. Translated in The Works of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding et al., vol. 7, 1887–1901, p. 253.

APA (7th ed.)

Bacon, F. (1901). De haeresibus. In J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, & D. D. Heath (Eds.), The works of Francis Bacon (Vol. 7, p. 253). (Original work published 1597)

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Knowledge itself is power’?” Last verified 10 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/knowledge-itself-is-power

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