Quotes About Ignorance

Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.

The gung-ho spirit overrode caution, as ignorance triumphed over reason.

pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as "the time of ignorance." But the primary meaning of the root JHL is "irascibility"—an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation.4

dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them.

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

The world runs," Lowell said, "on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don't mind what they don't see. Make them look and they mind, but you're the one they hate, because you're the one that made them look." They

One day a package of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn't read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn't smoke them.

Let's revise the old adage for our times. All that it requires for evil to succeed is that enough lazy, stupid bastards believe everything they're told.

Somehow, though, they managed to ignore the fact that being the dominant species on Earth meant that absolutely nothing about their position was inevitable or beyond their control.

Humans have a wonderful saying for everything and then proceed to ignore the wisdom in all of them.

You can't light a match, then act surprised when your house burns down.

Dash was a stupid man's idea of how a smart man sounded.

Ignorance never yet helped anybody.

To make the society [which of course consists of non-workers] happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied. [3] What Mandeville

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

Knowledge is annoying

going they hadn't heard of it either.

Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight.

The man who is rich in fancy thinks that his wagon is already built; poor fool, he does not know that there are a hundred timbers to a wagon.

General Taylor is, I have no doubt, a well-meaning old man. He is, however, uneducated, exceedingly ignorant of public affairs, and I should judge, of very ordinary capacity.

Zeal without knowledge is like expedition to a man in the dark.

A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy.