54 Quotes About Ignorance

In a world brimming with information and opportunities for enlightenment, ignorance remains an ever-present shadow. Whether it’s the ignorance of willful blindness or simply a lack of knowledge, it can impact our lives in profound ways. Quotes about ignorance often shed light on the importance of awareness, understanding, and education. They inspire us to break free from the confines of unawareness and embrace a more informed and thoughtful existence. In this curated collection of top 54 quotes about ignorance, you’ll find a rich tapestry of thoughts from great minds across history, offering insights and reflections that encourage growth and wisdom.

1. “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any 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.” - Frederick Douglass

2. “Science is the topography of ignorance.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

3. “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

4. “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

5. “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

6. “Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.” - W. E. B. DuBois

7. “Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” - G.K. Chesterton

8. “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” - George Bernard Shaw

9. “The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

10. “The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.” - Michael M. Lewis

11. “That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.” - Garth Stein

12. “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Daniel J. Boorstin

13. “I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.” - Jack Whyte

14. “When we set out on the path, we always have a fairly clear idea of what we hope to find. Women are generally seeking their Soul Mate, and men looking for Power. Neither party is really interested in learning. They simply want to reach the thing they have set as their goal.” - Paulo Coelho

15. “Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.” - Richard Dawkins

16. “Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.” - Douglas Adams

17. “If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.” - Ray Bradbury

18. “You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.” - Ray Bradbury

19. “And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.” - Plato

20. “When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.” - Anthony de Mello

21. “Why is man obliged to learn ignorance?” - Sorin Cerin

22. “To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted.” - William A. Dembski

23. “The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.” - Robert Ingersoll

24. “Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.” - W.H. Auden

25. “Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.” - Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

26. “The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.” - George Bernard Shaw

27. “It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.” - George Eliot

28. “We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.” - Helen Simonson

29. “Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” - Thornton Wilder

30. “Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.” - Zbigniew Brzezinski

31. “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

32. “Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it.""There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice."That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry.""For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries.""And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland.""So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.” - L. Frank Baum

33. “There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.” - C. JoyBell C.

34. “in times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.” - Abraham Lincoln

35. “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.” - Susan Sontag

36. “he who will not economize will have to agonize” - Confucius

37. “But perhaps there are in us forces other than mind and heart, other even than the senses - mysterious forces which take hold of us in the moments when the others are asleep; and perhaps it was such forces that Melchior had found in the depths of those pale eyes which had looked at him so timidly one evening when he had accosted the girl on the bank of the river, and had sat down beside her in the reeds - without knowing why - and had given her his hand.” - Romain Rolland

38. “Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.” - Jasper Fforde

39. “When there's a monster under your bed sometimes it really is best not to look.” - Jocelynn Drake

40. “I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

41. “I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.” - Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

42. “Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.” - Catherynne M. Valente

43. “The burden of knowledge is lighter than the joy of ignorance.” - Ogwo David Emenike

44. “The tram can run over you only if you are on the tram way! The darkness can run over you only if you are on the ignorance way!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

45. “نحن نلتقي بالناس و لا ندري ان وجوههم مثل لحاء شجر قديم حفر الزمن عليه القصص الكثيرة , ونحن؟ نقرأ القصه الوحيده التي نراها امامنا في الوجه..بغداد مالبورو” - نجم والي

46. “Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.” - Thomas Paine

47. “Isn't it funny how ignorance is the source of strength of so many?” - Lionel Suggs

48. “A guerra é a forma de Deus en­si­nar ge­o­grafia aos ame­ri­ca­nos.” - Ambrose Bierce

49. “The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

50. “If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.” - Baron D. Holbach

51. “And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.” - René Descartes

52. “I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.” - Tim Kreider

53. “We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.”--Zeena Schreck Interview for KJTV-1990” - Zeena Schreck

54. “After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.” - Zeena Schreck