Ignorance Quotes

However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

~ Suzy Kassem

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

~ Michael Crichton

A man who believes everything can be explained by science is just as ignorant as someone who believes everything can be explained by religion.

~ Zack W. Van

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.

~ Joe Bageant

Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint’s days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical

~ Eliza Lynn Linton

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

~ Charles Darwin

To know that you do not know is the best.To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.

~ Lao Tzu

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

~ Michel De Montaigne

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.

~ Clarence Darrow

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

~ Voltaire

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

~ Jane Austen

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe

~ Hippocrates

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

~ Osho

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

~ Hippocrates

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

~ Richard Dawkins

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

~ Randy Pausch

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

~ Carl Sagan

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.

~ Paul Henri Thiry D'holbach

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.

~ Louis L'amour

We do not learn for the benefit of anyone, we learn to unlearn ignorance.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

~ John Archibald Wheeler

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.

~ Jane Austen

There is no one who would not rather appear to know than to be taught.

~ Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

~ Plato

Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

~ Horace Mann

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

~ Ali Smith

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,Or any searcher know by mortal mind,Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind.

~ Edwin Arnold

Always hear others out and remain open-minded the day you think you know everything is the day you have the most yet to learn.

~ A.j. Darkholme

Ignorance is a knowledge illiteracy.

~ Toba Beta

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

~ Samuel Johnson

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond.

~ Thomas Paine

Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Information is what you put in empty heads to keep them empty.

~ Marty Rubin

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.

~ Kedar Joshi

When Socrates said he knew nothing he still thought he knew more than anyone else.

~ Marty Rubin

Ignorance is the darkest depths.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

What do I know about life? What does a windmill know about the wind?

~ Marty Rubin