Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [41-60] of 215 Ignorance quotesIgnorance QuotesIgnorance Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero To be ignorant of what happened before you were born... is to live the life of a child for ever.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.~ Justice Tom C. Clark Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.~ Charles Caleb Colton Lawyers are being graduated from our law schools by the thousands who have little knowledge of the Constitution. When organizations seek a lawyer to instruct them on the Constitution, they find it nearly impossible to secure one competent.~ Committee on American Citizenship Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.~ Confucius Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.~ William Cowper Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.~ Charles Darwin I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny.~ Perry de Havilland We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others.~ François Duc de La Rochefoucauld Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.~ Alphonse de Lamartine Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.~ Louis Charles Alfred de Musset The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.~ Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?~ Alexis de Tocqueville Those with power are frequently least aware of -- or least willing to acknowledge -- its existence [and] those with less power are often most aware of its existence.~ Lisa Delpit I was at last beginning to see how ignorant I had become, how long since I had read anything except Party literature. I thought of our bookshelves stripped of books questioned by the Party, how when a writer was expelled from the Party his books went, too. I thought of the systematic rewriting of Soviet history, the revaluation, and in some cases the blotting out of any mention of such persons as Trotsky. I thought of the successive purges. Suddenly I too wanted the answers to the questions Senator Hickenlooper was asking and I wanted the truth. I found myself hitting at the duplicity of the Communist Party.~ Dr. Bella Dodd Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.~ Norman Douglas As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.~ Justice William O. Douglas Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind.~ John Dryden Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print