Quotes About Ignorance

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

I would ask you to consider the crucifix as a homeopathic image, like those medicines that give you just enough of the disease so you could develop a resistance and be healed from it. The cross dramatically reveals the problem of ignorant killing, to inoculate us against doing the same thing.

Without a sense of the inherent sacredness of the world—of every tiny bit of life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect reality, protect it, or love it. The consequences of this ignorance are all around us, seen in the way we have exploited and damaged our fellow human beings, the dear animals, the web of growing things, the land, the waters, and the very air.

pride. If there's too much "I know," it will lead to illusion and ignorance. Isn't that ironic? Jesus says, "The person who says 'I know,' is precisely the blind one" (John 9:41).

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

people cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It

More painful than her naivete is the fact that she doesn't believe herself to be naive. Should you make the mistake of asking her why she's doing something so stupid, she'll explain it to you.

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.

Heroes can only thrive where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They. cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.

Leo drummed his fingers. "Great. I should have installed a smoke screen that makes the ship smell like a giant chicken nugget. Remind me to invent that, next time." Hazel frowned. "What is a chicken nugget?" "Oh, man…" Leo shook his head in amazement. "That's right. You've missed the last, like, seventy years. Well, my apprentice, a chicken nugget—" "Doesn't matter," Annabeth interrupted.

It's stupid what keeps people apart.

What they do no' understand, they fear, and they hate what makes them afraid, for they think it is a sign o' weakness.

From prideful wisdom one falls into simple stupidity

when we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.

I thought sooner or later someone would start saying it had gone too far, but it just kept on, and no one said anything. I

Year after year goes by, and nothing gets better. All we do is argue and debate and procrastinate. Any decent idea is amended to ineffectuality by the time it's gone half-way through the various committees it's obliged to pass through. The few people qualified to know what's what are talked to a standstill by ignorant people all around them.

It's easy not to find out things, if you try hard enough.

His talent was to express his readers' most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.

It did not occur to them that a woman could be dangerous. How foolish they were.

Nowadays he avoided political discussions with outsiders. They usually had easy answers: send all the Mexicans home, put Hells Angels in the army, castrate the queers. The greater their ignorance, the stronger their opinions.

Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven.

The greater their ignorance, the stronger their opinions. Georgetown