32 Quotes On Willful Ignorance

In a world overflowing with information, it's still all too easy for individuals to cling to willful ignorance, choosing to turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths. This mindset is not just a personal choice; it can have far-reaching implications on society and progress. To shed light on this phenomenon, we’ve curated a collection of the top 32 quotes on willful ignorance. These quotes offer profound insights and reflections from various thinkers, encouraging us to confront and challenge ignorance in its many forms. Dive in and explore these powerful words that compel us to seek truth and understanding.

1. “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” - Thomas A. Edison

2. “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin

3. “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.” - Ayn Rand

4. “People are stupid. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.” - Terry Goodkind

5. “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” - Plato

6. “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” - Atwood H. Townsend

7. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” - Charles Darwin

8. “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” - Abraham Lincoln

9. “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” - Soren Kierkegaard

10. “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” - Benjamin Franklin

11. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” - Richard Dawkins

12. “More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” - Richard Dawkins

13. “Humans see what they want to see.” - Rick Riordan

14. “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.” - Isaac Asimov

15. “The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.” - Aleister Crowley

16. “Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.” - Anne Rice

17. “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.” - John Steinbeck

18. “Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.” - Jodi Picoult

19. “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.” - Hendrick Willem Van Loon

20. “I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.” - Brandon Sanderson

21. “. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.” - Joyce Carol Oates

22. “It’s much easier not to know things sometimes.” - Stephen Chbosky

23. “The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.” - Aldous Huxley

24. “A man is responsible for his ignorance.” - Milan Kundera

25. “But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.” - Ray Bradbury

26. “The scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.” - Sheri S. Tepper

27. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov

28. “Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.” - Erin Morgenstern

29. “There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.” - Stephen Fry

30. “Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?” - Martin Freeman

31. “When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.” - Iain Pears

32. “(both circumvented the handicap of deafness by answering only those questions they believed had been asked & accepting only those answers they believed had been uttered - a stratagem embraced by many an American advocate)” - David Mitchell