Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bertrand Russell

Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

Bertrand Russell

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

Bertrand Russell

The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.

Whether it's out of laziness or ignorance, consumers' starting point is very much search.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.

H. P. Lovecraft

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

H. G. Wells

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.

Jean de la Bruyere

Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatical.

Jean de la Bruyere

Incivility is not a Vice of the Soul, but the effect of several Vices; of Vanity, Ignorance of Duty, Laziness, Stupidity, Distraction, Contempt of others, and Jealousy.

Jean Baudrillard

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

Jaron Lanier

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

Jane Rule

Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability.

Euripides

Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain.

Ernestine Rose

Ignorance is the evil - knowledge will be the remedy. Knowledge not of what sort of beings we shall be hereafter, or what is beyond the skies, but a knowledge pertaining to terra firma, and we may have all the power, goodness and love that we have been taught belongs to God himself.

Frederic Bastiat

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.

Gordon B. Hinckley

Conflict grows out of ignorance and suspicion.

Gerard De Nerval

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.

Herman Kahn

I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.

Henry David Thoreau

There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

Henry David Thoreau

If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

Holly Lisle

Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.

Igor Stravinsky

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Guy deBord

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Guy de Maupassant

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

Grover Cleveland

We will not forget that Liberty has made her home here, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected...A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and mans oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.

Giacomo Leopardi

Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.

Frank Zappa

Let's not be too rough on our own ignorance, it's what makes America great.

Frank Zappa

Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.

Frank Zappa

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

Frank Herbert

the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

Frank Herbert

It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge.

George Henry Lewes

Roger Bacon expressed a feeling which afterwards moved many minds, when he said that if he had the power he would burn all the works of the Stagirite, since the study of them was not simply loss of time, but multiplication of ignorance. Yet in spite of this outbreak every page is studded with citations from Aristotle, of whom he everywhere speaks in the highest admiration.