Ignorance Quotes

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Voltaire

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm

George Eliot

She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

Kurt Vonnegut

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Benjamin Franklin

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

Emma Goldman

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

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity

Thomas Jefferson

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.

Benjamin Franklin

...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Kurt Vonnegut

The vanity of the sciences. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.

Blaise Pascal

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato

But Catherine did not know her own advantages - did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.

Jane Austen

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities

George Eliot

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

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Thomas Carlyle

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance

Voltaire

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.