Best Quotes About Ignorance (Top 100)
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Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell
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Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll
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Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
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There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Socrates
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I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.
John Lennon
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One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Rita Mae Brown
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Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
Isaac Asimov
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I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change.
Nicholas Sparks
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Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Margaret Atwood
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Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Mark Twain
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We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Benjamin Franklin
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Harlan Ellison
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Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.
Mary Kay Ash
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The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei
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All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain
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Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
Benjamin Franklin
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There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.
Coco Chanel
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Isaac Asimov
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin
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I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.
Philip Pullman
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Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
Confucius
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If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov
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There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
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Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden...
Marcus Garvey
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The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
Socrates
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Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
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Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
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The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus
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To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov
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At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
Albert Einstein
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My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It s the letter I use to spell yuzz a ma tuzz. You ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around
Dr. Seuss
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The most violent element in society is ignorance.
Emma Goldman
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Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.
Kofi Annan
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I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance
Jon Stewart
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The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
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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.
Frederick Buechner
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If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius
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There is no sin greater than ignorance.
Rudyard Kipling
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Ignorance is the parent of fear.
Herman Melville
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Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.
Frank Zappa
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Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.
Anthony de Mello
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My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell
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True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Karl Popper
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A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
Daniel Handler
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We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.
Booker T. Washington
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There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.
Hippocrates
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Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Mark Twain
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Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
Edgar Allan Poe
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An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
James A. Michener
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Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
Aldous Huxley
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But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.
Sheryl Sandberg
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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Derek Bok
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I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell
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The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.
Paul Watzlawick
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Fear always springs from ignorance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.
Kahlil Gibran
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Aldous Huxley
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To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.
Voltaire
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The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
John F. Kennedy
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We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans
Zbigniew Brzezinski
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I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.
Gilda Radner
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
Emile Durkheim
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Any man who is attached to things of this world is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes of his own passions
Black Elk
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Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
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Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
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Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
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The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
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Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
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Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don't you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness? — and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, `Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,' they think it is all right.
Anna Sewell
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Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.
Guy Debord
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Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison
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The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
Aldo Leopold
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When we are not sure, we are alive.
Graham Greene
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I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
Lily Tomlin
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The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about.
Wayne Dyer
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I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny-fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.
Margaret Chase Smith
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True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.
Akhenaton
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Life is like college; may I graduate and earn some honors.
Louisa May Alcott
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In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.
St. Jerome
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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille
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Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.
Federico Fellini
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Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
Leonardo da Vinci
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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
James Clerk Maxwell
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I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
John W. Gardner
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Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.
Thucydides
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That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.
Albert Pike
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But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin
Even More Ignorance Quotes
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Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
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Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas
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The only thing that is more expensive than education is ignorance.
Benjamin Franklin
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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
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As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Gary Snyder
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Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.
William Penn
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He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.
Benjamin Disraeli
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How do you know so much about everything?' was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was 'By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.'
John Abbott
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Against stupidity the very gods fight in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
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Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
Michel de Montaigne
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Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
Isaiah Berlin
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Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.
Ernest Bevin
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Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou
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Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Thomas Paine
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There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
Frank Herbert
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Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.
Philip Wylie
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Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it.
Duane Michals
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Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.
Confucius
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The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
John Rawls
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The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli
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Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Lean from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.
Hyman Rickover
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Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.
Thomas Gray
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Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
Saadi
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His ignorance is encyclopedic.
Abba Eban
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God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.
Mary Daly
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Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl Popper
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Evil is relatively rare. Ignorance is epidemic.
Jon Stewart
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A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas Paine
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We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.
William Ellery Channing
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The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.
Dan Simmons
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It takes a lot of things to prove you are smart, but only one thing to prove you are ignorant.
Don Herold
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No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
Eduardo Galeano
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A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.
Gian Carlo Menotti
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I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming master of his fate and captain of his soul.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Albert Einstein
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Ignorance is always afraid of change.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.
Joanna Russ
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Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.
Arlo Guthrie
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Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
Elizabeth Goudge
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It is not good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.
Enrico Fermi
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Owing to ignorance of the rope the rope appears to be a snake; owing to ignorance of the Self the transient state arises of the individualized, limited, phenomenal aspect of the Self.
Guru Nanak
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An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Edward de Bono
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The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
Richard Bach
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This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
Jacob Bronowski
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A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole France
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Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.
Frank McCourt
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...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.
Robert Wright
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It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't."
Mignon McLaughlin
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The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him.
Crystal Eastman
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In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.
David Horowitz
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A man remains ignorant because he loves ignorance, and chooses ignorant thoughts; a man becomes wise because he loves wisdom and chooses wise thoughts.
James Allen
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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
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Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
Larry McMurtry
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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson
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All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
Isaiah Berlin
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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
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I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.
Kenneth Clark
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Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.
Robert Quillen
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Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
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It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin
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Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.
Addison Mizner
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The empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full barrel.
John Lyly
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I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist.
James Lee Burke
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The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.
John Muir
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What first truly stirred my soul was not fear or pain, nor was it pleasure or games; it was the yearning for freedom. I had to gain freedom-but from what, from whom? Little by little, in the course of time, I mounted freedom's rough unaccommodating ascent. To gain freedom first of all from the Turk, that was the initial step; after that, later, this new struggle began: to gain freedom from the inner Turk-from ignorance, malice and envy, from fear and laziness, from dazzling false ideas; and finally from idols, all of them, even the most revered and beloved.
Nikos Kazantzakis
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Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
William Ellery Channing
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It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Charles Darwin
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Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible.
Cherie Carter-Scott
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Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!
Bryce Courtenay
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My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou
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My top most priority is to deal with India's massive social and economic problems, so that chronic poverty, ignorance and disease can be conquered in a reasonably short period of time.
Manmohan Singh
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Ah! destructive Ignorance, what shall be done to chase thee out of the World!
Cotton Mather
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The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
Benjamin Franklin
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Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
Amos Bronson Alcott
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One learns by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try
Sophocles
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Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
Garrison Keillor
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Once you start asking questions, innocence is gone.
Mary Astor
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The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.
Garth Brooks
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Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.
W. Clement Stone
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Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance.
Isaac Watts
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The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is ignorance.
Brian Hwang
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Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
Lytton Strachey
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...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?
Lloyd Alexander
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The reason there's so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it.
Frank A. Clark
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A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.
Lord Chesterfield
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I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.
Eduardo Galeano
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Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow— it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it
Shakti Gawain
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams
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It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
Paul Gauguin
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Ignorance never settles a question.
Benjamin Disraeli
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Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.
Benjamin Franklin
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Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge.
Jim Butcher
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Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt
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There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.
John Masefield
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Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age.
Anna Garlin Spencer
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There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.
Juan Montalvo
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The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.
Gerard De Nerval
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God tolerates even our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us - as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray.
John Calvin
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In no other field of scientific endeavor do otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically, while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Horace Mann
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Then in October, Indian Summer, the air turned so soft, the sunlight so fragile, and each day's loveliness so poignantly doomed that even self-ignorance and restlessness felt like profound states of being, and he just wandered the empty beaches and misty headlands in a state of serene confusion and awe.
David James Duncan
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Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A. E. Housman
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The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance.
Confucius
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It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.
Jeremy Taylor
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Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
Susan Ertz
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You can do one of two things; just shut up, which is something I don't find easy, or learn an awful lot very fast, which is what I tried to do.
Jane Fonda
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Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom.
Bodhidharma
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The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
Elbert Hubbard
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Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.
Bennett Cerf
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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Will Durant
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Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Plato
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To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence.
Ann Plato
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I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance.
Socrates
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Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.
Benjamin Franklin
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I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.
Euripides
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The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.
William Hazlitt
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Ignorance of God's prophetic outline, failure to know God's program for the Church, the nations, and Israel, is the cause of the overwhelming amount of error and misunderstanding of the events of the future.
M. R. DeHaan
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If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion.
Taslima Nasrin
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The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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To let God make us, instead of painfully trying to make ourselves; to follow the path that his love shows us, instead of through conceit or cowardice or mockery choosing another; to trust Him for our strength and fitness as the flowers do, simply giving ourselves back to Him in grateful service,ツ葉his is to keep the laws that give us the freedom of the city in which there is no longer any night of bewilderment or ignorance or uncertainty.
Sarah Orne Jewett
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Whoever will be cured of ignorance, let him confess it.
Michel de Montaigne
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What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.
John Selden
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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.
David Hume
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The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.
James Truslow Adams
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Your ignorance cramps my conversation
Bob Hope
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I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
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Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.
Holly Lisle
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The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's knowin' so many things that ain't so.
Josh Billings
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Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
R. Scott Bakker
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To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.
James Bryce
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It is a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.
John Lyly
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
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The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.
Dorothea Brande
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Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.
Bill Richardson
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Ignorance is no excuse, it's the real thing.
Irene Peter
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Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't. But you can't tell the difference when you have no real information. Fear can create even more imaginary obstacles than ignorance can. That's why the smallest step away from speculation and into reality can be an amazing relief...The Reality Solution means: Do it before you're ready.
Barbara Sher
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Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham
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Today's audience knows more about what's on television than what's in life.
Larry Gelbart
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It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called "educated classes" are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.
Ernst Haeckel
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A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
Bob Edwards
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There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Gene Wolfe
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Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.
Frank Zappa
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Today, if you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly.
Irene Peter
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There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.
Lord Acton
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Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.
Anatole France
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Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives.
Bhagavad gita
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There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.
Van Wyck Brooks
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
Samuel Butler
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If we don't know life, how can we know death?
Confucius
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If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,-he will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine.
Henry Thomas Buckle
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One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
Gene Brown
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The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.
George Bancroft
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Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility.
William Jones
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Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
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Information can bring you choices and choices bring power - educate yourself about your options and choices. Never remain in the dark of ignorance.
Joy Page
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I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe
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Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
Dalai Lama
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All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.
Fred Allen
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Teachers must be celebrated for moving civilization from ignorance to enlightenment, from apathy to responsibility.
Sharon M. Draper
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Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
James Thurber
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Woe unto thee if after all thy profession thou shouldst be found under the power of ignorance, lost in formality, drowned in earthly-mindedness, envenomed with malice, exalted in an opinion of thine own righteousness, leavened with hypocrisy and carnal ends in God's service.
Joseph Alleine
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Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.
Elbert Hubbard
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Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.
Hippocrates
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It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
William Gibbs McAdoo
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Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.
Anthony J. D'Angelo
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There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
Mark Twain
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Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today and it will set the pace tomorrow.
Frank Dane
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Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.
Buddha
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The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.
Elbert Hubbard
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We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.
Warren Weaver
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Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Eric Hoffer
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Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
George Eliot
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The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
George Eliot
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A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
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One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge
Robert Lynd
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Poverty has many roots, but the tap root is ignorance.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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The trouble ain't that people are ignorant: it's that they know so much that ain't so
Josh Billings
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The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill
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Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.
Frederic Bastiat
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The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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No one know what he can do till he tries.
Publilius Syrus
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Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with ignorance...
William Blake
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Art hath an enemy call'd ignorance .
Ben Jonson
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Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.
Michel de Montaigne
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The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
Sacha Guitry
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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
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I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.
Charlie Chaplin
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It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
James Russell Lowell
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Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.
Dejan Stojanovic
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A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.
Herbert Spencer
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Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.
John Tillotson
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A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
Arthur Miller
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Nothing sways the stupid more than arguments they can't understand
Cardinal de Retz
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George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Mark Twain
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Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
Bill Watterson
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The greatest wisdom often consist in ignorance.
Baltasar Gracian
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True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
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Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.
Adlai E. Stevenson
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Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.
Clarence Darrow
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People are subject to moods, to temptations and fears, lethargy and aberration and ignorance, and the staunchest qualities shift under the stresses and strains of daily life.
Ilka Chase
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The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance
Thomas Jefferson