Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Jonson

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.

Alexis de Tocqueville

If a [democratic] society displays less brilliance than an aristocracy, there will also be less wretchedness; pleasures will be less outrageous and wellbeing will be shared by all; the sciences will be on a smaller scale but ignorance will be less common; opinions will be less vigorous and habits gentler; you will notice more vices and fewer crimes.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

Samuel Butler

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

Alberto Manguel

Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

Albert Einstein

Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely.

Albert Einstein

Never underestimate your own ignorance.

Albert Einstein

Condemnation before investigation is the highest form of ignorance.

Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred Marshall

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

Aldous Huxley

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Aldous Huxley

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Aldous Huxley

Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.

Aldous Huxley

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

Aldous Huxley

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

No wealth like education and no poverty like ignorance

There is no capital more useful than intellect and wisdom, and there is no indigence more injurious than ignorance and unawareness.

There is no greater wealth than wisdom, no greater poverty than ignorance; no greater heritage than culture and no greater support than consultation.

Adlai E. Stevenson

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

Adlai E. Stevenson

On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

Adolf Hitler

How fortunate for governments that people do not think. There is no thinking except in giving and executing commands. If it were otherwise human society could not exist.

Adam Savage

Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task. That's OK. The project may be the lion, but the list is your whip.

Abigail Adams

Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

A. E. Housman

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

Adrienne Rich

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Adam Smith

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Adam Smith

He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention

Adam Pascal

Ignorance is bliss. I wish I still had some.

Abraham Maslow

The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Cyril Connolly

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Daniel O'Connell

There is an utter ignorance of, and indifference to, our sufferings and privations....What care they for us, provided we be submissive, pay the taxes, furnish recruits for the Army and Navy and bless the masters who either despise or oppress or combine both? The apathy that exists respecting Ireland is worse than the national antipathy they bear us.

Kurt Vonnegut

The complicated futility of ignorance.