80 Quotes On Ignorance

In a world where knowledge is power, ignorance can often be a silent foil, shaping perspectives and influencing decisions in unseen ways. From philosophers to political leaders, many have pondered the role of ignorance in human experience, offering insights that both challenge and inspire. This curated collection of the top 80 quotes on ignorance invites you to explore the nuances of not knowing and to reflect on its impact in various aspects of life. Whether seeking understanding, consolation, or motivation, these quotes provide a lens through which to consider the delicate balance between what is known and what remains undiscovered. Dive in to explore the profound thoughts of great minds and perhaps find a spark to illuminate your own journey toward wisdom.

1. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Aldous Huxley

2. “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

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

4. “A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.” - Benjamin Franklin

5. “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” - Harlan Ellison

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

7. “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” - G.K. Chesterton

8. “He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.''All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.''What's so negative about it?' I said.'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.'"Ignorance,"' I said.” - Kurt Vonnegut

9. “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

10. “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

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

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

13. “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” - Molière

14. “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.[Circular to the States, 8 June 1783 - Writings 26:484--89]” - George Washington

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

16. “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

17. “A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.” - Sydney J. Harris

18. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.” - Graham Greene

19. “Ignorance is a lot like alcohol: the more you have of it, the less you are able to see its effect on you.” - Jay Bylsma

20. “Ignorance is ultimately the worst enemy of a people who want to be free.” - Jonathan Hennessey

21. “Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” - Noam Chomsky

22. “How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.” - Margaret Atwood

23. “Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.” - Joe Abercrombie

24. “Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.” - Joe Bageant

25. “Euere Schuld, Deichgraf!" schrie eine Stimme aus dem Haufen.” - Theodor Storm

26. “It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.” - Richard Dawkins

27. “It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.” - Herbert M Shelton

28. “His ignorance is encyclopedic.” - Abba Eban

29. “People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe” - Hippocrates

30. “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

31. “Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,Or any searcher know by mortal mind,Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind.” - Edwin Arnold

32. “Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.” - Anthony de Mello

33. “I am philosophical Christ; crucified on the cross of ignorance for the sake ofdivine vanity.” - Kedar Joshi

34. “Ralph Nimmo carecía de título universitario y se enorgullecía de ello. -Un título [...] es el primer paso de un recorrido calamitoso. Como no quieres desperdiciarlo, pasas al trabajo de graduado y a la investigación doctoral. Terminas por ser un absoluto ignorante de todo, excepto en tu estrechísima especialidad.” - Isaac Asimov

35. “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” - John Archibald Wheeler

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

37. “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

38. “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” - Albert Camus

39. “You're not like other Wasps.""Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score.""A few," Salma allowed."Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.” - Adrian Tchaikovsky

40. “A knavish speech sleeps in a fool's ear.” - William Shakespeare

41. “Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.” - Michael Pollan

42. “Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.” - Stephen R. Covey

43. “And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...” - Neil Gaiman

44. “Harshaw had the arrogant humility of the man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance and he saw no point in 'measurements' when he did not know what he was measuring.” - Robert A. Heinlein

45. “Ignorance is the world's most curable affliction.” - Jeri Smith-Ready

46. “Often, the greater our ignorance about something, the greater our resistance to change.” - Marc Bekoff

47. “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

48. “There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.” - R. Scott Bakker

49. “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

50. “It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” - Mitch Albom

51. “A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?” - Ashly Lorenzana

52. “Everyone has a sense of humor. If you don't laugh at jokes, you probably laugh at opinions.” - Criss Jami

53. “It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.” - Charles Darwin

54. “I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.” - Gore Vidal

55. “But Catherine did not know her own advantages - did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” - Jane Austen

56. “Only ignorance excuses stupidity” - Nalini Singh

57. “Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.” - Robert Fulghum

58. “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.

59. “And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn’t know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne.” - Frank Cottrell Boyce

60. “Where ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise.- Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” - Thomas Gray

61. “Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.” - G.K. Chesterton

62. “The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.” - Tom Robbins

63. “all appears to change when we change” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

64. “You're just another american who is willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being shoved up your asshole every day... The owners of this country know the truth... it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!” - George Carlin

65. “Evolution is a part of nature. The world has strayed away from God, and now interprets its conception for the benefit of blissful ignorance.” - Lionel Suggs

66. “To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

67. “The reason God exists is because ignorance is bliss, and God is true bliss.” - Lionel Suggs

68. “Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance” - Richard Dawkins

69. “Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn’t be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance.” - Deborah Feldman

70. “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

71. “Fear of the unknown and the other is the root of almost all hate. It is born of ignorance and fed by those who would keep us divided.” - Tinnekke Bebout

72. “How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!” - Ray Bradbury

73. “...But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.” - Belloc, Hilaire

74. “Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

75. “I don't know." That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.” - Alastair Reynolds

76. “Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.” - Ira N. Barin

77. “It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.” - Marilyn Frye

78. “Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.” - William Paley (paraphrase)

79. “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

80. “Look around you, he says, waving a hand at the surrounding tables. Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world, and what's worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them. They want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception, because to think it real would keep them up at night, afraid of their own existence.” - Erin Morgenstern