Ignorance Quotes - Page 73

The human species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and utopian visions that always led to mass murder-but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.

But if we hide ourselves away, afraid to grow and learn, we might wake up in the flames of the ignorance that burns and we'll never be much more than only casualties of war in a struggle we can't win if we have no faith to begin. We've got to tip the lid and let some sunlight in.

I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.

All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

Maybe the same instruments and tools that have been used to keep people in slavery and ignorance could potentially be used to liberate and awaken them.

Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

Attainment is a poor measure of capacity, and ignorance no proof of defect.

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.

My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.

If I jumped into the cliché, everybody will have seen it before. If I stick to my ignorance a little bit, maybe, maybe it will turn out different. Or maybe a slightly new aspect to a comic book villain.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

Darkness is the fit hour for beasts of prey, and ignorance the natural dwelling place of cruelty.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.

It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others; and in those regions of darkness and ignorance where man cannot effect even those things that are within the power of man, there we shall ever find that a blind belief in feats that are far beyond those powers has taken the deepest root in the minds of the deceived, and produced the richest harvest to the knavery of the deceiver.

Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.

The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other

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

If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun.

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