265 Ignorance Quotes

People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance.

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies - easily checkable, blatant lies - and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men - 15 of them are Saudis - and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq - how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.

Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

Who's Britannica to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say that it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American.

We believe that every being is divine, is God. Every soul is a sun covered over with clouds of ignorance; the difference between soul and soul is owing to the difference in density of these layers of clouds.

Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.

Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.

Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call 'civilization' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

'The rock is gonna fall on us,' he stood and told the class The professor put his chalk down and peered out through his glasses But he went on and said; 'I've seen it, high up on the hill If it doesn't fall this year then very soon it will!'

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

It was hard for me to do the show (All American Girl) because a lot of people didn't even understand the concept of Asian-American. I was on a morning show, and the host said, 'Awright, Margaret, we're changing over to an ABC affiliate! So why don't you tell our viewers in your native language that we're making that transition?' So I looked at the camera and said, 'Um, they're changing over to an ABC affiliate.'

'Television, the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation...'

People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment.

Prejudice comes from being in the dark; sunlight disinfects it.

Ignorance is not bliss -- it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I say, 'I think I might have written that.'

Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines.

If there is one word that you find coming out like a bomb from the Upanishads, bursting like a bombshell upon masses of ignorance, it is the word 'fearlessness.'

'No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.'

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond today.

'Not naive,' Conch Shell had corrected him, 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.'

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam Excels a dunce that has been kept at home!

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.

'If ignorance is bliss, then knock the smile off my face'

'When ignorance reigns, life is lost'

First come I; my name is Jowett. There's no knowledge but I know it. I am master of this college: What I don't know isn't knowledge.

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. (72)

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

After it hath been seen how the obstinate and the ignorant of evil disposition are accustomed to dispute, it will further be shewn how disputes are wont to conclude; although others are so wary that without losing their composure, but with a sneer, a smile, a certain discreet malice, that which they have not succeeded in proving by argument - nor indeed can it be understood by themselves - nevertheless by these tricks of courteous disdain they pretend to have proven, endeavouring not only to conceal their own patently obvious ignorance but to cast it on to the back of their adversary. For they dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But ignorance discontented and dexterous, learning what it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manufacture that can disgrace or mislead humanity.

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is a bliss when the knowledge is so damn frightening.

He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man - and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.

(Regarding humans.) They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo-knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.

The more we study, we the more discover Our ignorance.