Quotes About Ignorance

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

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.

There is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offenses, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom.

Because there is no greater evil than ignorance and the destruction of genius. Ignorance has been responsible for more death, more bigotry, and more sin than any other force. It is the destroyer of mankind.

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.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

The only thing worse than human ignorance is human pride in that ignorance.

He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.

The first thing the reasonable man must do is to be content with a very little knowledge and a very great deal of ignorance. The second thing he must do is to make the utmost possible use of the knowledge he has and not waste his energy crying for the moon. The third thing he must do is try and see clearly where his knowledge ends and his ignorance begins.

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.

Study and research into truth often only serves to make us see by experience our natural 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.

I have my ignorance to thank for the few things I know.

The affections are the children of ignorance; when the horizon of our experience expands, and models multiply, love and admiration imperceptibly vanish.

If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun.

Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

But if we keep denying that there are problems with some male immigrants, then we will just drive the people into the arms of the right-wing populists. Without the ignorance or the trivialization on the part of all the political parties, there would be no Pegida or Alternative for Germany.

Changing our decision sets up a bad habit. It reinforces decision-making as an expression of bewilderment and ignorance, instead of wisdom and freedom.

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

Wherever you go - in every country, or in every continent, people yearn and hunger for only one thing, to love and be loved. Love transcends international boundaries and heals the wounds of hatred, racial, prejudice, bigotry and ignorance. It is the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.

The only truly new ideas [the right] has come up with in the last twenty years are (1) supply side economics, which is a way of redistributing the wealth upward toward those who already have more than they know what to do with, and (2) creationism, which is a parallel idea for redistributing ignorance out from its fundamentalist strongholds to those who know more than they need to.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

It's interesting to be an adult and to have that level of ignorance about something, because the nice part about is you get that discovery. The learning curve is so rich and steep.

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires.

Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail.

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

The ignorance of the oppressed is strength for the oppressor.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance

Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.

Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.

There is no capital more useful than intellect and wisdom, and there is no indigence more injurious than ignorance and unawareness.

In ignorance, I am something; in understanding, I am nothing; in love, I am everything.

Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.