Quotes About Ignorance

Everyone thinks they know so goddamned much about everything and no one knows fuck all about anything.

Kaikki luulevat tietävänsä niin saamarin paljon kaikesta, mutta kukaan ei tiedä mistään mitään.

That's one thing I've learned: you think people are watching you, noticing things, but they're not.

Soon enough it was explained to Buck Nance that Key West was a bad location to be making fun of homosexuals, and also African-Americans. This bulletin was delivered by a 275-pound biker who happened to be both gay and black, and owned a right hand that fit easily around Buck's stringy, hirsute neck.

Spending time with Benny the Blister had shaken Buck Nance's confidence in the superiority of the white male. He and his brothers had clung to such views since their Romberg youth, warped by their father's fulminations. While redneck stardom had exposed Buck to many white fans who were poor advertisements for a master race, Blister stood out as one of the worst specimens he'd ever met: stupid, reckless, dirty, and delusional. And that's when he was stone sober.

Those who ignore history are doomed to get their nuts cut.

Men saw in whales everything-except whales themselves.

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster

If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. How can I dare to guess about humans in the far future? It is, I think, only a matter of natural selection. If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule.

Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family?

Hippocrates wrote: "Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.

New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.

Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.

The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues; the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding. In all of the four-billion-year history of life on our planet, in all of the four-million-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.

Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?