"There is nothing more frightful than an active ignorance. [Ger., Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine thatige Unwissenheit.]"
Read quote
5 likes
Ignorance quotes
Ignorance
2.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Ignorance
Browse quotes that often appear alongside ignorance — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Ignorance quotes (page 39 of 140)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If I can avoid the mirror when I brush my teeth in the morning, I will. I find security and safety in the most profound degree of ignorance. If you can just stay ignorant of almost everything you'll be OK. It's fine to stay informed and look at things, but to judge things will bog you down."
Read quote
5 likes
"His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further."
Read quote
5 likes
"Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late."
Read quote
5 likes
"You'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away peel;scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You'll see."
Read quote
5 likes
"Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you."
Read quote
5 likes
"A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself."
Read quote
5 likes
"Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas"
Read quote
5 likes
"A learned person among ignorant people, is like a live person among the dead."
Read quote
5 likes
"There is nothing so costly as ignorance."
Read quote
5 likes
"Fear is just another word for ignorance."
Read quote
5 likes
"Science . . . has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition. There is no personal salvation, except through science."
Read quote
5 likes
"We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere."
Read quote
4 likes
"Inner darkness, which we call ignorance, is the root of suffering. The more inner light that comes, the more darkness will diminish. This is the only way to achieve salvation or nirvana."
Read quote
4 likes
"...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake."
Read quote
4 likes
"What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much."
Read quote
4 likes
"All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation."
Read quote
4 likes
"No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society."
Read quote
4 likes
"There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth."
Read quote
4 likes
"Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate."
Read quote
4 likes