And Ignorance Quotes & Sayings

I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed — William McIlvanney

Ignorance. In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. — Ruth Ozeki

She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. — Maya Angelou

Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees. — George Eliot

Clearly, Channing had not taught her young charges that the Declaration and Constitution, while two of the noblest documents in the history of humankind, were also, naturally, products of their time that reflected the limitations of their time (which, needless to say, is why the Constitution has been amended so many times since its ratification); no, she had taught them to revile the founding fathers - men whose vision, courage, and sacrifice made possible the freedom these students have known (and taken for granted) all their lives. These young women were incapable of grasping that the very criteria by which they presumed to judge the author of the Declaration and Constitution would not be available to them if not for those men's efforts. To say this, of course, is not to blame these students for their ignorance, but to underscore just how profoundly ill-served they are by courses of this sort. — Bruce Bawer

I envy animals for two things - their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them. — Voltaire

The good repent on knowing their sin; the evil become angry when discovered. Ignorance is not the cause of evil, as Plato held; neither is education the answer to the removal of evil. These men had an intellect as well as a will; knowledge as well as intention. Truth can be known and hated; Goodness can be known and crucified. The Hour was approaching, and for the moment the fear of the people deterred the Pharisees. Violence could not be triggered against Him until He would say, 'This is your Hour. — Fulton J. Sheen

No, take more! What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal! This double worship, Where [one] part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance - it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness. Purpose so barr'd, it follows Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you - You that will be less fearful than discreet; That love the fundamental part of state More than you doubt the change on't; that prefer A noble life before a long, and wish To jump a body with a dangerous physic That's sure of death without it - at once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison. Your dishonor Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state Of that integrity which should become't; Not having the power to do the good it would, For th' ill which doth control't. — William Shakespeare

The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice. — Tom Feiling

What has been done is little - scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. — Agnes Mary Clerke

The commentaries usually mention nine kinds of internal formations: desire, hatred, pride, ignorance, stubborn views, attachment, doubt, jealousy, and selfishness. Among these, the fundamental internal formation is ignorance, the lack of clear seeing. Ignorance is the raw material out of which the other internal formations are made. Although there are nine internal formations, because "desire" is always listed first, it is often used to represent all the internal formations. — Thich Nhat Hanh

One definition occurred to both of them - that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods. — G.K. Chesterton

Answer this to yourselves, & expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel: Is not this plain & manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, & not pronounce heartily! That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders. And remember: He who despises & mocks a Mental Gift in another; calling it pride & selfishness & sin; mocks Jesus the giver of every Mental Gift. which always appear to the ignorance-loving Hypocrite, as Sins. but that which is a Sin in the sight of cruel Man. is not so in the sight of our kind God. — William Blake

The way in which we manage the business of getting and spending is closely tied to our personal philosophy of living. We begin to develop this philosophy long before we have our first dollar to spend; and unless we are thinking people, our attitude toward money management may continue through the years to be tinged with the ignorance and innocence of childhood. — Catherine Crook De Camp

The West Sister Dating Rules were clear on the matter of apologies. On the evolutionary scale of dating, a guy who apologized solely for the sake of ending the argument and getting back into your good graces was on the level of primeval slime - especially if he was clearly doing so merely because he was hoping for sex. The proper response was to unveil the offender's deceit by demanding he explain what exactly he was apologizing for, and then scorn him when he betrayed his ignorance. — Alex Gabriel

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. — Carl Sandburg

Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words? — Martin Freeman

Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

But the dull and stupid masses will continue in their sluggish bustle. — Jehan Sylvius

In politics, they have ran with the hare and hunted with the hound. In criticism, they have, knowingly and unblushingly, given false characters, both for good and for evil; sticking at no art of misrepresentation, to clear out of the field of literature all who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it. The latter, I rather think, was what they wanted. Mr. — Thomas Love Peacock

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? — Jonathan Safran Foer

The AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fueled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference. Science has accomplished miracles over the past 20 years, and science can now end this disease - but it cannot end the epidemic. We need more than medicine. We can do something about these things. We need to speak out about the changes we need to make in our society. — Elton John

On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries. — Frederick Soddy

Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. — Kingsley Amis

I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one's response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves. — David Bentley Hart

As the moon, though darkened with spots, gives us a much greater light than the stars that sewn all-luminous, so do the Scriptures afford more light than the brightest human authors. In them the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance. — Robert Boyle

It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious. — Alexei Panshin

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that "childhood reading experts" continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language. — Alan Jacobs

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. — Rebecca Solnit

Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency — Carlos Fuentes

In a world of differing opinions, mentally unstable people and complete psychopaths, it was the type of simplistic notion that some people wouldn't want to follow or ignorance would just simply not allow them to understand. — S.A. Tawks

Seeing the Way is like going into a dark room with a torch; the darkness instantly departs, while the light alone remains. When the Way is attained and the truth is seen, ignorance vanishes and enlightenment abides forever. — Gautama Buddha

I do not believe 'Newsweek' is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we're one of them, and I don't think there are that many on the edge of that cliff. — Jon Meacham

All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. — Robert Green Ingersoll

And confronting these men, wild and terrible as we agree that they were, there were men of quite another kind, smiling and adorned with ribbons and stars, silk stockinged, yellow gloved and with polished boots; men who insisted on the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of bigotry, ignorance, enslavement, the death penalty and war, and who, talking in polished undertones, glorified the sword and the executioners' block. For our part, if we had to choose between the barbarians of civilization and those civilized upholders of barbarism we would choose the former. — Victor Hugo

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him ... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Had there not been five bad qualities, all the people would have been righteous. Contentment with ignorance; love for worldly life; miserliness inspite of much wealth; ostentation in (good) deeds; and pride in their own intelligence. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Material nature itself is constituted by three qualities: the mode of goodness, the mode of passion and the mode of ignorance. Above these modes there is eternal time, and by a combination of these modes of nature and under the control and purview of eternal time there are activities, which are called karma. — Anonymous

The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction. Curiosity is the thirst of the soul; it inflames and torments us, and makes us taste every thing with joy, however otherwise insipid, by which it may be quenched. — Samuel Johnson

Ignorance produced genera, and science produced, and will continue to produce, proper names; nor of these shall we be afraid to increase the number, whenever we shall have occasion to denote different species. — Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

We can't see and we can't reach the true frontiers of our ignorance; we can only approach to it by extending our knowledge — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information. — Walt Disney

Not a week goes by without my learning something new about golf. That means, of course, that I was ignorant of eight things about golf two months ago. Extend that process back nearly twenty years and the result is an impressive accumulation of ignorance. — Peter Dobereiner

Ignorance is the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self. — Patanjali

Never trust those who would be your shield. They feed on your ignorance and darkness. It is best to look at things directly and be unafraid. — James Rollins

Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort
a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance. — Melanie Joy

Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance. — Karen Armstrong

Sometime over the last several decades - and it is only over the last several decades - science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance. — Atul Gawande

Most people never ask where the road goes if the road is very beautiful! This is an ignorance because the 'endings' may never carry the beauties of the beginnings! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

My galley, charged with forgetfulness,
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness,
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the weared cords great hinderance;
Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drowned is reason that should me consort,
And I remain despairing of the port. — Thomas Wyatt

All the variety of species of life created be,
By combination of three basic material energy;
- 45 -
These Guna modus operandi of material energy,
They are called tamo, rajo and sattva clearly;
- 46 -
Tamo-guna associated with inertia, ignorance be,
The rajo-guna associated with passion, activity;
- 47 -
Sattva-guna associated with goodness, harmony,
And all three of them associated with thinking truly.
- 48 - — Munindra Misra

My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

It seems to me that if one had kept silence up to now regarding religion, people would still be submerged in the most grotesque and dangerous superstition ... regarding government, we would still be groaning under the bonds of feudal government ... regarding morals, we would still be having to learn what is virtue and what is vice. To forbid all these discussions, the only ones worthy of occupying a good mind, is to perpetuate the reign of ignorance and barbarism. — Denis Diderot

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world. — Helen Keller

Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone."
"And conscience," added the bishop.
"It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us. — Victor Hugo

Fanaticism and Ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding. — Jerome Lawrence

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

The are two kinds of people in this modern society. First and the majority are those fools who think they are wise, and second are the few wise individuals who know that they are fools. — Abhijit Naskar

The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness. — W.E.B. Du Bois

We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence. — Alexis De Tocqueville

..there was nothing to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper, and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your weapons- you must think out new replies to his objections and provide yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways. — Upton Sinclair

Arrogance is inimical to prudential reasoning, to accepting that for all we know and learn we also accumulate ignorance of the questions we do not ask, the risks we do not and cannot comprehend. In short, arrogance is what causes us to ignore our fallibilities. — Ziauddin Sardar

He supposed it was inevitable. Dip a person into one particular specialty deeply enough and long enough, and he would automatically begin to assume that specialists in all other fields were magicians, judging the depth of their wisdom by the breadth of his own ignorance ... — Isaac Asimov

Finally, "industrial society," to use a genteel euphemism for capitalism, has also become an easy explanation for the environmental ills that afflict our time. But a blissful ignorance clouds the fact that several centuries ago, much of England's forest land, including Robin Hood's legendary haunts, was deforested by the crude axes of rural proletarians to produce charcoal for a technologically simple metallurgical economy and to clear land for profitable sheep runs. This occurred long before the Industrial Revolution. — Murray Bookchin

And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port. — Michel Foucault

It's easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That's America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change? — Michelle Obama

Don't let ignorance blind you. Open your eyes, heart and your mind. And if you're feeling alone, know that the world can be a lonely place, but it would be lonelier without you in it. — Hayley Williams

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.1 Leopold von Ranke — Joachim Fest

When blindness and boldness, ignorance and arrogance, weakness and willfulness, meet together in men, it renders them odious to God, burdensome in society, dangerous in their counsels, disturbers of better purposes, intractable and incapable of better direction, miserable in the issue. Where Christ shows his gracious power in weakness, he does it by letting men understand themselves so far as to breed humility, and magnify God's love to such as they are. — Richard Sibbes

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice. — Martin Guevara Urbina

Civilisation has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance. — Eugen Sandow

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. — Isaac Asimov

The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth. — George MacDonald Fraser

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. — Herman Melville

His sisters
my aunts
did not go to school at all, just like millions of girls in my country. Education had been a great gift for him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all of Pakistan's problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls. The school that my father dreamed of would have desks and a library, computers, bright posters on the walls and, most important, washrooms. — Malala Yousafzai

Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food. — Henry Fielding

But ignorance of the law is no excuse. A person is guilty even if he breaks the law unknowingly. I shall be perhaps the first of the defendants to get up on that stand and admit that I am at least partly guilty. — Walther Funk

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a Colossus shall we be when the Southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries. — Thomas Jefferson

The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge. — David Brooks

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. — Richard Ford

In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence - ignorance ... about the separation of self and other ... about the consequences of our actions. — Sharon Salzberg

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it. — Samuel Johnson

But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards. — Leo Tolstoy

I'm a natural blonde. But when I started acting, I would go to auditions and they didn't know where to put me because I was voluptuous and had the accent, but I had blonde hair. It was ignorance: they thought every Latin person looks like Salma Hayek. — Sofia Vergara

Religious fervor controlled by prejudice and ignorance is the greatest calamity that can befall a nation. — John R. Musick

Even when I do roles that are really profoundly abusive, like, I would say, in 'Deadwood' - there's a guy who's a breeding ground for ignorance and hurtful behavior - the fact that people are so taken aback by that is a good thing because they're looking at themselves, and there's a part of me in there, too. — Michael Harney

Few governmental institutions are more misunderstood and feared out of ignorance than the Federal Reserve Board. — David Baldacci

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. — John Stuart Mill

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented ... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal. — Swami Vivekananda

No matter how challenging the ensuing process may become at times, the inner light and love in the human heart always has the power to dispel darkness and ignorance. — William Keepin

Shallow intellect is worse than ignorance. Ignorance can be treated with knowledge, but shallow intellect, that is illusion of knowledge, is untreatable and quite dangerous to the progress and wellbeing of humanity. — Abhijit Naskar

Someone has said,"Education is going from an unconscious to conscious awareness of one's ignorance."..No one has a corner on wisdom. All the name-dropping in the world does not heighten the significance of our character. If anything, it reduces it. Our acute need is to cultivate a willingness to learn and to remain teachable. — Charles R. Swindoll

A ship with a hole underneath is doomed to sink! And ignorance is also a hole in the brain, a big hole! — Mehmet Murat Ildan