Sunday, April 16, 2017 – Militant Ignorance
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. ~ Mark Twain
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ~ George Orwell
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance. ~ Karl A. Menninger
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~ George Bernard Shaw
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~ Winston Churchill
An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims makes it impossible to be great at all. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. ~ Charles Darwin
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. ~ James A. Baldwin
I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. ~ Oscar Wilde
Where ignorance is bliss it’s foolish to borrow your neighbor’s newspaper. ~ Kin Hubbard
All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance. ~ Will Rogers
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. ~ James Madison
Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. ~ Michel de Montaigne
Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care. ~ Jimmy Buffett
Ignorance is not bliss – it is oblivion. ~ Philip Wylie
Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved. ~ Thucydides
The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism. ~ William Osler
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ H. P. Lovecraft
It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. ~ Aldous Huxley
I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance. ~ Ruben Blades
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. ~ Henry Adams
Cruelty is all out of ignorance. If you knew what was in store for you, you wouldn’t hurt anybody, because whatever you do comes back much more forceful than you send it out. ~ Willie Nelson
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. ~ Will Durant
It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block. ~ Paul Gauguin
Ignorance is bliss. I wish I still had some. ~ Adam Pascal
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. ~ H. L. Mencken
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. ~ Saul Bellow
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. ~ Thomas Jefferson
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. ~ Isaac Asimov
Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong. ~ Benjamin Disraeli
Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. ~ Thomas Paine
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t – it’s human. ~ Desiderius Erasmus
My relationships with my cats have saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance. ~ William S. Burroughs
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better. ~ Edward de Bono
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred. ~ George Bancroft
Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. ~ Maya Angelou
Chance is a name for our ignorance. ~ Leslie Stephen
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous. ~ Charles Dudley Warner
Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous? ~ Bill Watterson
If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun. ~ Carter Burwell
Ignorance is the mother of admiration. ~ George Chapman
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation. ~ Anthony Hope
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. ~ Mark Twain
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. ~ G. K. Chesterton
If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people. ~ Victor Cousin
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. ~ Isaac Asimov
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December, 1813
Beware the man of a single book. ~ Thomas Aquinas
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance – a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. ~ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
He must be very ignorant, for he answers every question he is asked. ~ Voltaire
Nothing can illustrate these observations more forcibly, than a recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances, under which our Republic assumed its rank among the Nations; The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government; the free cultivation of Letters, the unbounded extension of Commerce, the progressive refinement of Manners, the growing liberality of sentiment have had a meliorating influence on mankind and increased the blessings of Society. At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own. ~ George Washington, Circular to the States, 8 June 1783
Whoever said ignorance is bliss must have died a horrible death with a really surprised look on his face. ~ Lisa Shearin
Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent. ~ Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Just Above Sunset 