Selected ignorance quotes

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

2. I don't even know what street Canada is on.

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

4. The man who laughs has simply not yet had the terrible news.

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

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

7. Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Violence is a tool of the ignorant.

12. 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.

13. 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!

14. I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

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

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

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

18. The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

19. It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.

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

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

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

23. 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.

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

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

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

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

28. 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.

29. Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

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

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

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

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

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

35. I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

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

37. True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

38. 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.

39. 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.

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

41. Ignorance alone stands in the way of socialist success. The capitalist parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers from seeing the light. Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery.

42. Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.

43. Il n'y a guere d'homme assez habile pour connaitre tout le mal qu'il fait.

44. Dans l'amitie comme dans l'amour on est souvent plus heureux par les choses qu'on ignore que par celles que l'on sait.

45. Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! - just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject.

46. A prince who will not undergo the difficulty of understanding must undergo the danger of trusting.

47. When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

48. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

49. But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

50. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

51. It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.

52. Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

53. Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine tatige Unwissenheit.

54. What can we know, or what can we discern, When error chokes the windows of the mind, The diverse forms of things, how can we learn, That have been ever from our birthday blind?

55. Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

56. Who winks and shuts his apprehension up.

57. Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.

58. I like not knowing what's happening out there -- who's doing what, how they were, what the box office was. Even when I'm in the soup bowl of Hollywood, I just play Barbies and hang out with the kiddies. (2004)

59. The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that be can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox , he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds.

60. Look at you, you madman! Screaming you are of thirst and dying as if you are in a desert, when all around you there is nothing but water.

61. Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

62. There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.

63. What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists.

64. None is so deaf as those that will not hear.

65. 'I don't know what that is.'

66. Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

67. Quelle verite que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge qui se tient au dela?

68. Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.

69. It is better to don't understand something true, than to understand something false.

70. 'Didn't Frankenstein get married?' 'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'

71. 'You know your Shelley, Bertie!' 'Oh, am I?'

72. I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both the feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I.

73. It just showed once again that half the world doesn't know how the other three quarters live.

74. If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.

75. It is only the ignorant who despise education.

76. Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

77. The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.

78. (on the perceived need for cautious political development): 'We are the High Chiefs of these islands. We are the leaders of the people. On us is the duty of pointing out to them the right course. Bear this in mind. We have to lead on two points- hold back those who advocate radical changes (for which we are not sufficiently educated) and enliven the laggards before their ignorance destroys us.'

79. 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.

80. The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

81. A number 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy.

82. Five and twenty ponies Trotting through the dark- Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk. Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie - Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!

83. The most hopeful people in the world are the young and the drunk. The first because they have little experience of failure, and the second because they have succeeded in drowning theirs.

84. I was 22 and I didn't know anything about politics, it didn't interest me.

85. The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.