Ignorance Quotations

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

I perceive two things in Scotland of the most fearful omen: ignorance of theological truth, and a readiness to pride themselves in and boast of it.

If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Curiosity killed the cat, but where human beings are concerned, the only thing a healthy curiosity can kill is ignorance.

Mental illnesses are so frightening and there's so much ignorance about them that I think it comforts people to think, 'Oh, well, it happens to these people because they deserve it.'

The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.

Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

I don't like greed, I don't like ignorance. I really don't like anger. But I love love.

I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.

Oh, the ignorance of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England.

We are born knowing nothing and with much striving we learn but a little; yet all the while we are bound by laws that hearken to no plea of ignorance, and measure out their rewards and punishments with calm indifference. In such a state, humility is the virtue of men, and their only defense; to walk humbly with God, never doubting, whatever befall, that His will is good, and that His law is right.

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.

Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.

India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

Space is as infinite as we can imagine, and expanding this perspective is what adjusts humankinds focus on conquering our true enemies, the formidable foes: ignorance and limitation.

If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.

In practice, socialism didnt work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.

It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. There's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Ah! destructive Ignorance, what shall be done to chase thee out of the World!

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Stubbornness and ignorance and determination are a very fine line from each other. I'm a very stubborn person, but not so stubborn that I can't learn new things and meet new people, but I have a one-track mind.

Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

I happen to have worked with male directors who don't understand women at all. Not at all. I'm flabbergasted by their ignorance.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.

All around me insisted that my doubts proved only my own ignorance and sinfulness; that they knew by experience they would soon give place to true knowledge, and an advance in religion; and I felt something like indecision.

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

It takes a lot of things to prove you are smart, but only one thing to prove you are ignorant.

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, 'The good outnumber you, and we always will.'

I pretty much operate on adrenaline and ignorance.

There is no sinfulness in the will and affections without some error in the understanding. All lusts which a natural man lives in, are lusts of ignorance.

Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation.

The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.

I never considered I might make a career out of writing as I was going to school, so when I did turn my attentions that way, I was very ill prepared, having only what I read as a guide, and no formal training whatsoever. I credit that very ignorance with a great deal of my success.

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.

Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.

One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.

I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, youd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler - a mafia wife.

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.

There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.

God tolerates even our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us - as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray.