Best 3803 quotes in «ignorance quotes» category

...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

But they that hold God to be [an incorporeal substance]do absolutely make God to be nothing at all. But how? Were they atheists? No. For though by ignorance of the consequence they said that which was equivalent to atheism, yet in their hearts they thought God a substanceSo that this atheism by consequence is a very easy thing to be fallen into, even by the most godly men of the church.

But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary.

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.

By ignorance the truth is known.

By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.

Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.

Careful studies of cases dealing with supposed 'mental disorder' have at times revealed that many thought to be insane or warped in some fashion were actually simply highly sensitive individuals. What they suffered from was not mental debilitation, but personal and communal ignorance of psychic reality.

Certainly I am sometimes afraid, but my hope is greater than my fear, and the biggest enemy we all face is ignorance which breeds hatred, whether it be in America, or Afghanistan, or anywhere. We owe it to our children that we may give them all a legacy of peace, but it will take courage and compassion.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

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

Chance ... must be something more than the name we give to our ignorance.

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

Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos,’ ‘accidental,’ ‘chance,’ ‘unpredictable,’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance.

Charity puts and end to poverty; righteous conduct to misery; discretion to ignorance; and scrutiny to fear.

Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.

Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.

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

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Choice! The key is choice. You have options. You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame, and self-pity. But hold on! If this is true then why have so many among us apparently elected to live in this manner? The answer is obvious. Those who live in unhappy failure have never exercised their options for a better way of life because they have never been aware that had any choices

Condemnation before investigation is the highest form of ignorance.

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

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.

Complacent ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul

Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

Congress should fund research on the effects that violent video games have on young minds... We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science.

Conflict grows out of ignorance and suspicion. As we learn to know and appreciate those of various cultures, we come to appreciate them.

Consciousness of myself, combined with complete ignorance of everything that does not fall within my sphere of thinking, is the most telling proof of my substantiality outside God, of my original existence

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.

Comedy itself is based upon very old principles of which I can readily name seven. They are, in short: the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance, surprise, the pun, and finally, the comic situation.

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Conclusions are ignorance arrested on the path to less ignorance.

Confident and courageous leaders have no problems pointing out their own weaknesses and ignorance.

Consciousness will always be present, though a particular consciousness may cease. For example, the particular tactile consciousness that is present within this human body will cease when the body comes to an end. Likewise, consciousnesses that are influenced by ignorance, by anger or by attachment, these too will cease. But the basic, ultimate, innermost subtle consciousness will always remain. It has no beginning, and it will have not end.

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.

Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with. . . . Time will reverse the judgement of the vulgar.

Contrary to what you may think, an immoral act of any kind will only lower your self-esteem. Be true to yourselves, and your respect for yourself will increase. Know that yours is a divine birthright. Cultivate a good opinion of yourselves. Others may make cutting remarks concerning you. This is only a sign of their ignorance and not of your qualities. Walk with that dignity which is becoming a young woman who is a daughter of God.

Cowards never win victories. We have to fight fear and troubles and ignorance if we expect them to flee before us.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.