Quotes About Ignorance

Some of the most rewarding scientific pursuits begin with the discovery of a paradox. Nature does not go out of its way to befuddle us, and if some phenomenon seems to make no sense no matter how we look at it, we are probably in ignorance of deep and far-ranging principles.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability. If that sounds mystical or paradoxical, think about the probability that a coin I just flipped landed heads. For you, it's .5. For me, it's 1 (I peeked). Same event, different knowledge, different probability.

The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our igno- rance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily.

Probabilites are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

The ignorance is measurable. Pollsters repeatedly find that while people tend to be too optimistic about their own lives, they are too pessimistic about their societies. For instance, in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

Remember that you are a teacher, you are helping people, making them feel safer, taking them from fear to love, from ignorance to knowledge.

She's so in love with me, she doesn't know anything. That's why she's in love with me.

You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

Love transcends international boundaries. It heals the wounds of racial hatred, prejudice, bigotry and ignorance.

Hate is the last refuge of the ignorant. Love is the medicine. Compassion is the gift of the awakened ones.

My garden will never make me famous, I'm a horticultural ignoramus.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

Imagine, more precisely, that you are so afraid that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want. Knowing would simultaneously mean hoping, and your hopes have been dashed. You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance. You are afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting;

Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.

Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you.

When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we've been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes--often at the worst possible moment. It is then that we see what focused intent, precision of aim and careful attention protects us from.

These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.

Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.