c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When I came to again—parched, pain rampaging through my intestines—I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs. P.’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself) [. . .] “I think he has eaten many kidney beans.” Mrs. P. shuddered. “Many kidney beans not cooked.” “Beans!” I cried again deliriously. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Bel said. “Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?” “Of course I didn’t soak them,” I said. “What are you talking about?
— Paul Murray
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is mylight.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.
— Thomas Ligotti, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?
— Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
— Ronald Reagan
The thing about stereotyping is it's usually just throwing rocks into a crowd hoping to hit somebody who deserves it.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
The seeking face that does not alter when presented with peace and reason, must bask in its wearer's prideful ignorance.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
People strive hardest to save face, when the beauty they value is solely extrinsic.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
He decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.
— Haruki Murakami, Samsa in Love
People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -even when those stories concern their own native counties...Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Faced with so much ignorance and prejudice currently I can only comment that Facebook is a breeding ground for the worst fruits of our coarse personality.
— J.B.Alves
Where ignorance prevails, there an opportunity exists but the possessor of ignorance shall always be ignorant of opportunities
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Fanatics are like debris following the course of the wind, they are swept around like sand, and convinced to believe in what they do not understand.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Sure, Mom.They stop and say hello, and then once you pass they talk the back off you like you were nothing. They assess your outfit, your hairstyle, and they garble what you say so it comes out ugly.
— A.S. King
Until we find an antidote to our ignorance, our purpose shall always be hindered by ignorance
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, The Untapped Wonderer in You: Dare to Do the Undone
what wisdom can build, ignorance can destroy
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, The Untapped Wonderer in You: Dare to Do the Undone
That's the trouble with the world we live in, Dana. It's full of people just doing their job and ignoring what's really going on. Care about the rainforest until they get a couple of kids and enough money for a gas guzzling car, or some fancy hardwood dining furniture. Watch all those wildlife programmes and coo over the furry animals, but still eat meat and poultry that was raised in conditions of unbelievable cruelty. I'm sorry, but we live in a relatively free society. The facts are available, but people choose to ignore them. As far as I'm concerned, any educated person who works for the government or a big oil company is guilty through their own selective ignorance.
— Robert Muchamore, Divine Madness
The seeking face that will not alter when presented with reason, must delight in its wearer's prideful ignorance.
— Justin Kyle McFarlane Beau
If you feel ashamed of ignorance,it's your fault.Try to make yourself acceptable.
— Arunesh mani
Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.
— Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out their new gun on an intruder.
— Shannon L. Alder
The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
There were some things it was better not to know. They caused "metaphysical" anguish, for which there was as yet no remedy. When it was worried, the Tribe was inhibited and unable to act.It was very bad for everyone. The Tribe started to produce toxins that poisoned it. Its long-term survival was more important than short-term knowledge of the truth. If an eye had seen something that the brain knew was dangerous for the rest of the organism, it was better for the brain to put out that eye.
— Bernard Werber, Empire of the Ants
No people who are ignorant can be truly free.
— Thomas Jefferson
A democracy of mean and ignorant people is just as scary as any other horrible form of government.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
It's okay to not know who you are and what you want. Those with the answers are usually very happy in their own stuck-ness
— Darnell Lamont Walker
You can only manage to convince a person to admit to being wrong, not ignorant, arrogant, or stupid.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Not every person that speaks less than you do is more ignorant than you are.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Deep-rooted beliefs are one of the many consequences of intellect, and also of ignorance; and telling one from the other is sometimes impossible.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
There are feet that are swift to mete out defeat to anything different, but in doing so the assailant is already defeated. I say to them that the lack of awareness concerning their premature end is due to their immaturity and ignorance. The awareness defeatists lack, is found in those they hunger to defeat. To them, difference is hostility.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Ignorance is the supreme oppressor.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.
— Clarence Darrow, The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow
This is the eternal challenge with ignorance — ignorance can't see itself.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted.
— Blaise Pascal, The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent
So little I know in my innocence. Ideals, like pebbles in a stream wash away, wash away. Life makes no sense.
— Kristen Heitzmann, Secrets
Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow.
— Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus
We might not be equal in what we know but we are surely equal, in what we do not know.
— Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
It is easier to exploit and manipulate people if they are fearful or confused, (and discouraged from trusting their own judgment). Our investigation identifies the ‘policy of prohibition’ as a major source of ignorance, fear and confusion concerning psychoactive substances, their uses, users, effects and outcomes.
— Daniel Waterman, Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility
The Red Cross irritated Ugwu
—  the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour.
Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.
— Frank Zappa
Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate other for their innocence's sake?
— Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
— Noam Chomsky
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
— Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
My heart goes out to some of those rather hostile yet highly intelligent individuals who may see problems really because they have solutions. That hostility is learned in defense; not offense. An often stubborn and prideful world, in its self-destructive, temporary bliss of ignorance, may be violently resistant to the watchful mind.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Don't ever mistake silence for ignorance, when it is obviously stupidity
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
Ignore ignorance. The ultimate way to deal with men with ignorant mentality who are ignorance of your purpose on earth is to ignore their ignorance
—  capitalize on their ignorance and let them appreciate your purpose in awe and admiration
The book: an umbrella against ignorance
— André Letria
The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought
—  the wise eschew thought but not phenomena.
Big mouths and small brains make the strangest noises.
— Orrin Woodward
It is true that a great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them. But it is a great mistake to suppose that he will do this better for being ignorant of the traditions.
— John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
If you know one thing very well and the rest only superficially, that one thing will always appear to be more 'unique.
— Piero Scaruffi
The admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
— James Edwin Gunn, Transcendental
Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?
— Mark Twain
Ignorance is a horrible thing. But arrogance, the belief that knowing a little more than the ignorant makes you wise, is more horrible still.
— James Rozoff
We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors.
— Russell Brand
Knowledge is a dangerous thing. But ignorance is no protection.
— Masha du Toit, The Broken Path
We might not be equal in what we know but we are equal in what we do not know.
— Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
Ignorance. It claws, tears, and eventually destroys the threads that hold humanity together. These people all around me saying not this, not that…Their tongues untied with the rudeness they fear not to speakTo those they know nothing of, nothing about.Your hair is too tangled, your thighs too fatYour religion, your morals, you can’t possibly believe in that.I do, someone else does too.You are ignorant.
— Dani Abarca
Times like this, I don't wish for ignorance. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat: roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waiflike, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting.
— Ayize Jama-Everett, The Liminal People
The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced. He has been the sport and prey of priest and king, the food of superstition and cruel might. Crowned force has governed ignorance through fear. Hypocrisy and tyranny—two vultures—have fed upon the liberties of man. From all these there has been, and is, but one means of escape—intellectual development. Upon the back of industry has been the whip. Upon the brain have been the fetters of superstition. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished. Reading, writing, thinking and investigating have all been crimes.Every science has been an outcast.All the altars and all the thrones united to arrest the forward march of the human race. The king said that mankind must not work for themselves. The priest said that mankind must not think for themselves. One forged chains for the hands, the other for the soul. Under this infamous regime the eagle of the human intellect was for ages a slimy serpent of hypo
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Don't feel better than anybody, because you feel like something. Always have it at the back of your mind that you were nothing before you became something, and that thing you supposed to be is absolutely nothing.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.
— Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom.
— H.G. Wells, Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
Everybody is ignorant, Just on different subjects.
— Will Rogers
Religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, however, animal activists ask people to see things they can prove. When Christian animal and environmental activists finally demand that their church be better stewards over the world, we will see change. Until then, one percent of sermons will teach parishioners about the importance of being stewards over our animals in a year. Mega churches and corporate religious empires will continue to own stock in companies that pollute our earth and exploit our animals. Ignorance and hypocrisy will continue to corrupt the pureness of the Gospel. From here, we will not be truly “saved” because we choose not to save ourselves.
— Shannon L. Alder
It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think.''That's sad,' said Montag, quietly, 'because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness.
— Pierre-Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde
If ignorance is on the march, stand aside and let it pass you by.
— George Scott Wilkie
Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn't make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.
— Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
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
History was ignorant and had a mean streak, so it tended to repeat.
— Raymond L. Atkins, The Front Porch Prophet
We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Ignorance shrinks minds
—  perception is the compass to knowledge.
There are many backstabbing friends who in your hard time will ignore you, without to ask something from them. You just are filled with sadness and they don't confide in you anymore. The downside of your hard time is being considered rude, negative, boorish and insistent.
— Camelia C.
Sometimes it's good to let people swim in ocean of ignorance and let them struggle to the shores of enlightenment.
— Uzoma Nnadi
Where there is ignorance, sickness will thrive.
— Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito
Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.
— Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
— Will Rogers
Ignorance must be a fun place to live
—  my parents seem to vacation there year-round.
Ourhunters come from a diversified set of beliefs, but work together toward one goal. And we’re the bestat what we do.”“But you guys were at the church.”Jayden shrugged. “Father Bancroft is an area leader, so the church is our base, but elsewhere itcould be a synagogue, mosque, Buddhist temple. Any holy place will do. We fight demons, not eachother.
— A.E.  Kirk, Demons at Deadnight
The valuable attributes of research men are conscious ignorance and active curiosity.
— Willis R. Whitney
The ignorance we’re ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.
— Leah Hager Cohen, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance
Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.
— David Brewster, More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian
If bliss are a type of potato, then ignorance can be french-fried
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
It is never just disagreement but always intellectual dishonesty that is the apologist's worst enemy. And its apprentice is ignorance.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
— Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
Christian missions to India imply that India is a land of heathens, and, therefore, stands on the same level with the Andaman or the Fiji Islands. That a country which has been recognised in all ages the world over as the mother of all religions and the cradle of civilisation should be considered as pagan, shows how much ignorance prevails in Christendom. Since the Parliament of Religions, I have been studying Christian institutions, and I have also studied the way in which the Christian ministers and the missionaries are manufactured in this country, and have learned to pity them. We must not blame them too severely, because their education is too narrow to make them broad-minded. I grant that they are good-hearted, that they are good husbands and often fathers of large families, but generally they are very ignorant, especially of the history of civilisation and of the philosophy of religion of India. Most of them do not even know the history of ancient India.We know that in this age of competition, centralisation, and monopoly, very many people are forced out of business. The English say, 'The fool of the family goes into the Church'; so that when a youth is unable to make a living, he takes to missionary work, goes to India, and helps to introduce among the Hindus the doctrines of his church, which have long since been exploded by science.
— Virchand Gandhi, The Monist
According to the conclusion of Dr. Hutton, and of many other geologists, our continents are of definite antiquity, they have been peopled we know not how, and mankind are wholly unacquainted with their origin.
— Jean-André de Luc
Ignorant is not the one who does not know much but the one who does not make senses.
— Galina Nelson
In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it.
— Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it drives science
Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.
— John Brockman
I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
— Philip Plait
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
— George Bernard Shaw
But promises based on ignorance always prove disappointing.
— Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Keeper of Lost Causes
How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom,” Viviane said. “Then, when you begin to learn, you will not have to forget all the things you think you know.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
its not a good idea to argue with ignorant people but sometime ignorance can't be ignored
— Adnan Safi
The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion.
— Robert Fulton, A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation: Exhibiting the Numerous Advantages to Be Derived from Small Canals and Boats of Two to Five Feet Wide Containing from Two to Five Tons Burthen: With a Description of the Machinery for Facilitating...
I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.
— Jasmine Ann Cooray
If the Pentateuch is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, geography, history or philosophy, if it is not inspired concerning slavery, polygamy, war, law, religious or political liberty, or the rights of men, women and children, what is it inspired in, or about? The unity of God?—that was believed long before Moses was born. Special providence?—that has been the doctrine of ignorance in all ages. The rights of property?—theft was always a crime. The sacrifice of animals?—that was a custom thousands of years before a Jew existed. The sacredness of life?—there have always been laws against murder. The wickedness of perjury?—truthfulness has always been a virtue. The beauty of chastity?—the Pentateuch does not teach it. Thou shalt worship no other God?—that has been the burden of all religions.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know
—  for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.
Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.
— William Jennings Bryan, The Bible Or Evolution
The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a 'hypothesis,' but the word 'hypothesis,' though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word 'guess.' If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word 'hypothesis.' When it is understood that “hypothesis” means 'guess,' people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.
— William Jennings Bryan, The Bible Or Evolution
The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one's life is built. Evolution applied to fish, birds and beasts would not materially affect man's view of his own responsibilities except as the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis as to these would be used to support a similar hypothesis as to man. The evolution that is harmful—distinctly so—is the evolution that destroys man's family tree as taught by the Bible and makes him a descendant of the lower forms of life. This ... is a very vital matter.
— William Jennings Bryan
To turn down knowledge is to resign to ignorance.
— Kyle Schmalenberg
A rat in its stealing behavior may manage to steal gold jewelry and to make a nest with it but that does not in anyway qualify the rat to be a millionaire though it's gold pieces be worth that much.
— Newton Gatambia
We can't see and we can't reach the true frontiers of our ignorance
—  we can only approach to it by extending our knowledge
I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.
— Voltaire, Micromegas and Other Short Fictions
Violence is the method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak. The strong of heart and brain need no violence, for they are irresistible in their consciousness of being right.
— Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism
I hate stupidity, but what I hate even more is when people actually brag about it.
— Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.
— Enrico Fermi
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
— Henry David Thoreau, Walking
Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
— Henry David Thoreau, Walking
The Ladies of the Sacred Heart hung a thousand veils between their little charges and reality. Thérèse despised them for confounding virtue with ignorance.
— François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux
we are too busy listening to our thoughts that we don't hear the wonderful sounds surrounding us...
— Alina Radoi
Ignorance is not a capital crime. It is a correctable condition.
— Laura Knight-Jadczyk
And just like that, as if I hadn't said anything at all, the ladies sprang into a conversation about the sinful nature the Jews possessed when killing their Lord Jesus. I didn't know if I was hearing this right because I had become so intoxicated, but I couldn't believe that anyone would talk about religion while on vacation. How could Miss Nebraska think this was a proper environment to discuss something so controversial? One woman went on to say that if she had her way not only would President Bush serve a second four-year term, but she hoped they would overturn Roe v. Wade. This woman was obviously a menace to society and needed to be stopped.
— Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
Ignorance is Illiteracy.
— Ahtesham
Oh, come on. A vamp marrying a human gets the fanged ones all upset, and Eve made herself look like the ultimate fang-anger to all the humans by putting a ring on one, so what did you expect exactly? Flowers and parades? This is Texas. We're still figuring out how to spell tolerance.
— Rachel Caine, Bitter Blood
Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact…
— Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England
I’m now ‘Doctor’ to the patients and I have to cover my ignorance by waving my arms and looking grave.
— Howard Florey
Man will destroy what man fears!
— Nadina Boun
I don't respect thinking that is dangerous, prejudicial, childish, and could get me killed.
— Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
— James Clerk Maxwell
Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god. That only leaves a god who interacts with the universe in some detectable way. But if science, which is the greatest realization of the use of our senses to, you know, detect things, hasn’t found this god, that doesn’t say much for individuals.In short, the god you’ve created is, in fact, undetectable by science. The limits of science are not the province of religious knowledge. Where science is ignorant, so is religion. The only difference is that religion lacks the integrity of science.
— Matt Dillahunty
The church knows that an educated man is an unbeliever. That is why there is a continual struggle on the part of the clergy to adulterate education with superstition. To maintain their untenable position they must keep the people shackled to a form of mental slavery. Both fear and superstition are forms of a contagious disease.The ignorance of man produced natural fears of the elements of nature. What he could not understand he attributed to malevolent spirits whose primary purpose was to punish and harm him. Under this spell it seems almost incredible that he ever advanced from his state of primitive ignorance.His fears produced such fantastic monsters of the air that it was first necessary to relieve his tormented mind of these terrifying myths of ghosts and gods before he was able to acquire even the simplest rudiments of knowledge.Man's ignorance and fears made him an easy prey of priests. His gullibility was such that he believed everything he was told. He soon became a slave to these liars and hypocrites.
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
— Celsus, On the True Doctrine
The greater our knowledge increases the greater our ignorance unfolds.
— John F. Kennedy
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.
— Galileo Galilei
The key point some Christians miss is that scientific ignorance about the beginning of life, or any of life's processes, is not evidence of a god.
— Guy P. Harrison, 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian
I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.
— Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks
Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.
— Peter Sloterdijk
Politics and Sport were invented to give unknowledgeable people an opportunity to share their knowledge.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans -- neither fearing the loss of the other.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
To Trazada's surprise the Generalissimo laughed, a great subterranean rumbling that shook his gigantic frame like an earthquake. 'Remedios, mia pobre Remedios, they are ignorant. They are afraid. They are stupid and superstitious. Why, most of them think that television is witchcraft and that because they are allowed to vote they have control over the government. And they know it is impossible for a woman to make such a thing. They would never believe you.'("The Generalissimo's Butterfly")
— Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Cautionary Tales
It has been said at various points in history that the current sum of humanknowledge is but a fraction of that which was once known, yet now is lost.Likewise, it is argued with simple mathematics that any sum of knowledge wemay yet accrue must always equate to virtually nothing when compared to theinfinity of what is. Apparently our's is a fate of perpetual ignorance. What then is truly lost in the course of human events?(attrib: 'R.I.B. Ushguriud', Note On The Text)
— Robert Robert, Orijjjjjjice
Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say. A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism.
— Robert T. Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism
Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.
— Victoria Schwab, The Archived
A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!
— Richard Feynman
There’s a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, called “argument from ignorance.” This is how it goes. Remember what the “U” stands for in “UFO”? You see lights flashing in the sky. You’ve never seen anything like this before and don’t understand what it is. You say, “It’s a UFO!” The “U” stands for “unidentified.”But then you say, “I don’t know what it is; it must be aliens from outer space, visiting from another planet.” The issue here is that if you don’t know what something is, your interpretation of it should stop immediately. You don’t then say it must be X or Y or Z. That’s argument from ignorance. It’s common. I’m not blaming anybody; it may relate to our burning need to manufacture answers because we feel uncomfortable about being steeped in ignorance.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
Should the discovery of fire have been avoided because arsonists can misuse it? Any kind of information can be misused by those who are determined to do so. The place to stop the misuse of knowledge is not at the point of inquiry, but at the point of misuse.
— Arthur R. Jensen, Straight Talk About Mental Tests
Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
Even one voice in a wilderness of ignorance is a voice that is heard by someone.
— Kristen Ashley, Golden Trail
Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.
— Stephen Fry, The Book of General Ignorance
To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana