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ignorance quotes

  • Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

    - Maya originally MayaJohnson Angelou
      I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, ch.17.

  • Don't die of ignorance.

    -Anonymous
      AIDS awareness campaign slogan.

  •    In civil business;What first? Boldness;What second, and third? Boldness. And yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.12,'Of Boldness'.

  • True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.

    - Claude Bernard
      An Introduction to theStudy of Experimental Medicine, vol.1, ch.1, section 3 (translated by H C Greene).

  • And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Acts of the  Apostles17:30.

  • If you think education is expensivetry ignorance.

    - Derek Bok
      In Town and Country, May.

  • Have mercy upon all Jews,Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take fromthem all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Collects, Good Friday.

  • For I say, this is death and the sole death, When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, And lack of love from love made manifest.

    - Robert Browning
      Dramatis Personae,'A Death in the Desert'.

  • Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

    - Robert Browning
      The Inn  Album, canto 5.

  • Science, after all, is onlyan expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

    - Samuel Butler
    Collected in H F  Jones (ed)  The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1912).

  • Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      Biographia Literaria, ch.12.

  • Even if they're functioning out of ignorance, theyare still participating and must be suppressed. In China, even one million people can be considered a small sum.

    -Deng Xiaoping
      Of pro-democracy demonstrators. In The Times, 5  Jun.

  • Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance So far, to make us wish for ignorance?

    - SirJohn Denham
      Cooper's Hill, l.145^6.

  • Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

    -Washington Bailey
      Speech in Washington DC, commemorating the 24th anniversary of emancipation.

  • Whatever Nature has instore for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignoranceisnever better than knowledge.

    - Enrico Fermi
    Quoted in Laura Fermi  Atoms in the Family (1954).

  • To each his suff'rings, all are men, Condemned alike to groan; The tender for another's pain, Th'unfeeling for his own. Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

    -Thomas Gray
      Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (published1747), l.91^100.

  • The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which 388 is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.

    -William Hazlitt
      In The Atlas,15 Feb.

  •    Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.

    -Hippocrates   c.460
    The Canon, vol. 4 (translated by  John Chadwick).

  • The Enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance, and sown the tares of spiritual errors.

    -Thomas Hobbes
    Leviathan, pt.4, ch.44.

  • 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 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heav'n Than when I was a boy.

    -Honorius of Autun
      'I Remember'.

  • There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice, And wake from ignorance the WesternWorld.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
    c.1737  Irene, act 4, sc.1 (first produced1749).

  • Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      The Vanity of Human Wishes, l.345^6.

  • Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Reply to a lady who had asked why he had defined pastern as the'knee'of a horse. Quoted in  James Boswell  The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.1.

  • To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, issurely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always to some degree subject to affection.Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
    ^81 Lives of the English Poets,'Halifax'.

  • I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

    -Stockton
      In the Wall Street  Journal,13  Aug.

  • I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1589  The Jew of Malta (published1633),'Prologue to the Stage, At the Cock-pit'.

  • Surely, it is in youth man is most thoroughly depraved. Hell lies about us in our infancy. The youthful innocency sung by aged poets (who forget their first childhood) is nothing but ignorance of evil. As the child comes to know evil, he loves it.

    -Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake Mishima
      In the Jail Journal,13  Apr.

  • If your daughters are inclined to love reading, do not check their inclination by hindering them of the diverting part of it. It is as necessary for the amusement of women as the reputation of men; but teach them not to expect anyapplause from it† Ignorance is as much the fountain of vice as idleness, and indeed generally produces it. People that do not read or work for a livelihood have many hours they know not how to employ, especially women, who commonly fall into vapours or something worse.

    - Lady Mary Wortley ne  e Pierrepoint Montagu
      Letter,  Jan. Collected in R Halsband (ed) Selected Letters of Lady Mary  Wortley Montagu (1970).

  • Gesetzt, wir wollenWahrheit: warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? Und Ungewissheit? Selbst Unwissenheit? Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?

    - FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche
      Jenseits von Gut und Bo«  se (Beyond Good and Evil), section1 (translated by R  J Hollingdale).

  • The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at the bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.What is really at issue is the right to report events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      'The Prevention of Literature', in Polemic,  Jan.

  • War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt.1, ch.1.

  • The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

    - Sir William Osler
      Quoted in Montreal Medical Journal, Sep.

  • Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

    - Blaise Pascal
    c.1654^1662  Pense  es, no.23.

  • Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 2, l.1^12.

  •    For this, indeed, isthetruesource ofour ignorancethe fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

    - Sir Karl Raimund Popper
      Lecture to the British Academy, 20 Jan.

  • Ignorance est me'  re de tous les maux. Ignorance is the mother of all evils.

    - Fran c° ois Rabelais
      Cinquie'  me Livre, pt.7.

  • Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him.

    -John Selden
    TableTalk (published1689).

  • And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate as an old mare might droop across a fence to the dull pastures of her ignorance. Her husband held her upright while he prayed to God who is all-forgiving to send down some angel somewhere who might land perhaps in his foreign wings among the gradual crops. She munched, half dead, blindly searching the spoon.

    -A'Ghobhainn
    Thistles and Roses,'OldWoman', stanzas1^2.

  • There is only one good, knowledge, and only one evil, ignorance.

    -Socrates
    Quoted in Diogenes LaertiusVitae Philosophorum, 2.31 (translated by R D Hicks,1950).

  • The historyof theVictorian age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

    - (Giles) Lytton Strachey
      EminentVictorians, preface.

  • Where blind and naked Ignorance Delivers brawling judgements, unashamed, On all things all day long.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'Merlin andVivien', l.662^4.

  • I am very glad that I see Rome while it yet exists; before a great number of years are elapsed, I question whether it will be worth seeing. Between the ignorance and poverty of the present Romans, every thing is neglected and falling to decay.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Letter. Collected in P Cunningham (ed) The Letters of HoraceWalpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1857^9).

  • Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloomisgone.Thewholetheoryof moderneducationis radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Lady Bracknell.The Importance of Being Earnest, act1.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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