Famous Quotes & Sayings

Annie Besant

Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.

Anna Quindlen

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

Anna Quindlen

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Blind and naked ignorance delivers brawling judgments, unashamed, on all things all day long

Anthony Burgess

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

Ann Plato

To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence.

Anatole France

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

Anatole France

For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

Anatole France

Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.

Richard Bach

Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!

Richard Bach

To learn anything, you must put aside the safety of your ignorance.

Richard Bach

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

Robert Fulghum

Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.

Rita Mae Brown

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.

Rita Mae Brown

Armies are dependent on youthful male ignorance.

Richard Dreyfuss

I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.

Rene Descartes

For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than th eincreasing discovery of my own ignorance

Thucydides

Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.

Thomas Paine

How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.

Thomas Paine

Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.

Thomas Paine

Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.

Thomas Hood

I remember, I remember The fir-trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky; It was a childish ignorance, But now 't is little joy To know I'm farther off from heaven Than when I was a boy.

Thomas Hood

It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm further off from heaven Than when I was a boy.

Thomas Huxley

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

Thomas Sankara

The spirit is smothered, as it were, by ignorance, but so soon as ignorance is destroyed, spirit shine forth, like the sun when released from clouds.

Thomas Sankara

The enemies of a people are those who keep them in ignorance.

Thomas Sowell

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.

Thomas Sowell

Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance.

Thomas Sowell

People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising - and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.

Thomas Sowell

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Thomas Sowell

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

Thomas Sowell

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

Thomas Sowell

One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.