Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-20] of 215 Ignorance quotesIgnorance QuotesIgnorance Next 20 quotes Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.~ Henry Brooks Adams The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.~ John Adams All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.~ John Adams Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!~ Samuel Adams No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.~ Samuel Adams I would far rather be ignorant than wise in the foreboding of evil.~ Aeschylus The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.~ Herbert Sebastien Agar The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.~ Fisher Ames If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.~ Isaac Asimov Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.~ Isaac Asimov When it comes to our nation's military affairs, ignorance is not bliss. What's remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know.~ William J. Astore The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear.~ Aung San Suu Kyi There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.~ Roger Bacon So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong.~ Walter Bagehot Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.~ Frederic Bastiat Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error. ~ Frederic Bastiat The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.~ Frederic Bastiat The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!~ Charles Baudelaire To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.~ Cardnial Robert Bellarmine 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 Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print