Quotes About Ignorance

Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.

Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels.

Never get to the point where you will be ashamed to ask anybody for information. The ignorant man will always be ignorant if he fears that by asking another for information he will display ignorance. Better once display your ignorance of a certain subject than always know nothing of it.

What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

I remeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visable.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

The ethical rule is from Samuel Johnson who believed that maintenance of easily removable ignorance by a responsible office holder was treacherous malfeasance in meeting moral obligation. The prudential rule is that underlying the old Warner & Swasey advertisement for machine tools: "The man who needs a new machine tool, and hasn't bought it, is already paying for it". The Warner & Swasey rule also applies, I believe, to thinking tools. If you don't have the right thinking tools, you, and the people you seek to help, are already suffering from your easily removable ignorance.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Now, ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.

I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.

Ignorance of ignorance, then, is that self-satisfied state of unawareness in which man, knowing nothing outside the limited area of his physical senses, bumptiously declares there is nothing more to know!

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.

Is there a wrong way to say "I don't know"? Yes. When we declare ignorance, it should be a) honest and b) in the spirit of opening ourselves up to hearing, to learning, to receiving. When we say "I don't know" under these conditions, the words can forge connection, healing, growth. But when we resist or disavow knowledge, when we profess ignorance as a way of donning armor and evading accountability, then we make a mockery of those words, and we rupture connections not only with others but within ourselves, within our souls.

Systems of religious error have been adopted in times of ignorance. It has been the interest of tyrannical kings, popes, and prelates to maintain these errors. When the clouds of ignorance began to vanish and the people grew more enlightened, there was no other way to keep them in error but to prohibit their altering their religious opinions by severe persecuting laws. In this way persecution became general throughout Europe.

Arrogance is actually just ignorance. Ignorance of what you really are in relation to the world-but most of all in relation to God.

I write to please myself—of course, that is a given. But beyond this reach for pleasure, I know that I write for my countrymen, that they may be lifted from apathy and ignorance. I write because of a compulsion to make something out of the nothing that is my own life.

Ignorance, vulnerability, fear, anger, and desire are expressions of the infinite potential of your buddha nature. There's nothing inherently wrong or right with making such choices. The fruit of Buddhist practice is simply the recognition that these and other mental afflictions are nothing more or less than choices available to us because our real nature is infinite in scope.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end.

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.

[The Catholic convent] had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days.

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom.

I think the way my modeling career took off, I did not expect. It was definitely not a ripple in my mind. I just never thought it was going to happen like this. I'm just here and I'm having fun and I'm trying to smile and not think about it too much. That's the hardest thing in life. I think about things way too much. Ignorance is totally bliss.

The great mass of people judge well of things, for they are in natural ignorance, which is man's true state.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

Knowledge that takes you, not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.

Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools.

Respectfully, 'Awkward Black Girl' was never meant to be politically correct. We poke fun at ignorance.

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy.

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.

I felt that the world, and in particular this country, were going in circles. What had happened 40 or 50 years ago was happening again, but even in a worse form - that we were sinking into a lot of ignorance and a lot of superficial change.