Quotes About Ignorance

Between these two programs---the industrial and the agrarian, the global and the local---the most critical difference is that of knowledge. The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. In such circumstances, the degradation of products and places, producers and consumers, is inevitable.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

But ignorance of when to stop is a modern epidemic; it is the basis of industrial progress and economic growth. The most obvious practical result of this ignorance is a critical disproportion of scale between the scale of human enterprises and their sources in nature.

The question stands and waits, to be asked and asked, never finally to be answered, which he believes affirms a kind of faith. The world is fitted together, is held in its place in the great sky, has held together so far, through the worst of human damage so far, and by no human's power to save or make or know. That he can sometimes fit a mere poem's parts together is his fallback position, a sign of his limits, his formal ignorance, his faith in the great coherence.

We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature.

By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

Her least favorite thing: VOLUNTARY IGNORANCE

but often it is best to plead ignorance. That way you are more likely to learn secrets that might otherwise have been denied you.

What right had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the future, that this man, too, must escape with impunity because he escaped ME?

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

To be happy, one must be as ignorant as youth. Youth thinks that willing and striving are joys; it has not yet discovered the weary insatiableness of desire, and the fruitlessness of fulfilment; it does not yet see the inevitableness of defeat.

I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.

In the midst of unprecedented learning popular ignorance flourished, and chose its exemplars to rule the great cities of the world.

If we go back to the beginning," says Holbach, "we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom respects and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.

La educacion es el progresivo descubrimiento de nuestra propia ignorancia.

Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that "you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it." However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'"70 "By what right could a being created free force another to think like himself?"71 "A fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries.

Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.

The greatest sin is what brings about the heart's death. It dies only by not knowing God. This is what is named "ignorance.