Quotes About Ignorance

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

to be ignorant of "either letters or swimming," Plato declared, was to lack a proper education.

In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office, and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of the Southern whites.

Where the wages are smallest and the conditions hardest, there emigration has reached the highest mark. In other words, it is precisely from those parts of Italy where there are the greatest poverty, crime, and ignorance that the largest number of emigrants from Italy go out to America, and, I might add, the smallest number return. Of the 511,935 emigrants who came to North and South America from Italy in 1906, 380,615 came from Sicily and the southern provinces.

The genocide didn't begin on the sixth of April 1994, but in 1959 through little massacres that no-one paid attention to.

The stupidest men are the ones who think they can't be wrong. The stupidest men are the ones who are most sure. The stupidest men are the ones who don't know what they don't know.

Modern man, more afraid of embarrassment sometimes than safety, often ignores it at his own peril.

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.

Dulce bellum inexpertis. ("War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.") —ERASMUS

Jem, I ain't ever heard of a nigger snowman, I said.

There's nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who'll take advantage of a Negro's ignorance. Don't fool yourselves—it's all adding up and one of these days we're going to pay the bill for it. I hope it's not in you children's time.

Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.

What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say "nigger" when the word had never crossed their lips before?

Why reasonable people go stark mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand...

Jem, I ain't ever heard of a nigger snowman,' I said.

She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash.

These top-water nigger preachers . . . like apes . . . mouths like Number 2 cans . . . twist the Gospel . . . the court prefers to listen to Communists . . . take 'em all out and shoot 'em for treason . . . Against

be', il vecchio Adolf Hitler ha dato addosso agli ebrei, li ha messi in prigione, gli ha portato via tutto e non li ha lasciati uscire dal paese, e poi ha lavato tutti i deboli di nente... Lavato i deboli di mente?... Sissignora, penso che fosse perché non capivano di doversi lavare, forse un debole di mente non sa tenersi pulito.

Mais ce pays met en application l'idée que tous les hommes naissent égaux dans une institution humaine qui fait du pauvre l'égal d'un Rockefeller, du crétin l'égal d'un Einstein, et de l'ignorant l'égal de n'importe quel directeur de lycée. Cette institution, messieurs les jurés, c'est le tribunal.

It's hard to explain - ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody....baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.

To have your face rolled down over your eyes and not even to notice your blindness. That's dead, I think, as dead as it's possible to be.

Perhaps we may be, for a time, blissfully ignorant or happily deceived, and in those ways, despite all of the difficulties that endanger us, we may temporarily avoid being especially upset or disturbed. In the end, however, our ignorance and our false beliefs are likely just to make our circumstances worse.

so great was his feeling of rightness that he could ignore the dark shadow of the future.

There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.