Quotes About Ignorance

I'm ordering a bottle of Bordeaux. I know as much about wine as I know about horses or bipolar women.

And then I started to think, that the less I know about what people think of my work, the better off I am.

I disagreed. I disagreed with the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant

I, like a fatuous dunce who didn't realize how bad I was, jumped right in with the confidence of a true know-nothing. I practiced

Anyone who imprisoned people on the ground of ignorance might fairly be confined himself by those who understood what he did not.

Despite attending a nominally Christian school, I had not yet been inside a church—and I wasn't about to dare the deed now. I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

I am thoroughly convinced that these ignorant humans really think us other animals exist just to entertain them. How egotistical can they be?

I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.

To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.

He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool He who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion.

Weather today is an increasing trend toward denial.

That is how science and medicine are practiced best, though—we are best when we admit our ignorance up front, and then attempt to fill the darkness of not-knowing with the light of information and knowledge.

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)

They condemn what they do not understand.

I was ungrateful to Providence by not being happy; and, yet, does happiness always result from the gifts of intelligence? I tend to believe the contrary: one must pay for the gift of knowledge by wishing not to know...

Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.

Where does thinking get us?' she said. 'All thinking does is bring you down. <...> If you want to get on in life there's things in life you have to ignore so that you can keep on.

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.

We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.