Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Swift

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.

Kelley Armstrong

Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

Mahatma Gandhi

To conceal ignorance is to increase it. An honest confession of it, however, gives ground for the hope that it will diminish some day or the other.

Norton Juster

Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo. "Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.

Norton Juster

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.

Emile M. Cioran

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

Ellen Goodman

There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

Ellen G. White

The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.

Ellen G. White

A life in Christ is a life of restfulness. There may be no ecstasy of feeling, but there should be an abiding peaceful trust. Your hope is not in yourself; it is in Christ. Your weakness is united to His strength, your ignorance to His wisdom, your frailty to His enduring might....Let the mind dwell upon His love, upon the beauty, the perfection of His character..

Eric Schlosser

What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.

Ellar Coltrane

The fact that I'd never really seen myself on screen allowed for a blissful ignorance. It didn't feel like a movie. I didn't have that self-consciousness. It was a game that I was playing.

Edward Teller

There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible.

Henry Taylor

A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret. It is not many years since a State secret of the greatest importance was printed without being divulged, merely by sending it to the press like any other matter, and trusting to the mechanical habits of the persons employed. They printed it piecemeal in ignorance of what it was about.

Henry Steele Commager

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.

Henri Poincare

Chance ... must be something more than the name we give to our ignorance.

Heraclitus

And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

Heraclitus

It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.

Henry Ward Beecher

Ignorance is the womb of monsters.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In happy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to find every pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire; and now, on my return from that wide world... how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing more frightful than an active ignorance. [Ger., Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine thatige Unwissenheit.]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

And here, poor fool, with all my lore I stand no wiser than before.

Khaled Hosseini

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

Khalil Gibran

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.

Khalil Gibran

Let ignorance reproduce itself until it is weary of its own offspring.

Jonathan Safran Foer

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Naomi Wolf

It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Passionate people invariably deny their anger, and cowards often boast their ignorance of fear.