Ignorant Quotes - Page 21

• If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Believe, Thinking, Government

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• And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

  Amy Tan

  Daughter, Mother, Fear

  Amy Tan (2006). “The Joy Luck Club”, p.40, Penguin

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• He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.

  Isabel Allende

  Arrogance, Quality, Sincere

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• Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment.

  Lynsay Sands

  Stupid, Ignorance, Intelligent

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• Oh blind! Oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity which spurs us so in the short mortal life and steeps us so through all eternity!

  Dante Alighieri

  Self, Spurs, Blind

  "The Divine Comedy".

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• The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Intelligent, People, Confusion

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• Advice, then, young yeoman: When referring to the king's middle daughter, state that she is fair, speculate that she is pious, but unless you'd like to spend your watch looking for the box where your head is kept, resist the urge to wax ignorant on her naughty bits." -Pocket I don't know what that means, sir." -Yeoman Speak not of Regan's shaggacity, son" [...] -Pocket

  Christopher Moore

  Daughter, Kings, Mean

  Christopher Moore (2009). “Fool: A Novel”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.

  Bertrand Russell

  Lying, Exercise, Matter

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.153, Psychology Press

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• One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

  Henry James

  Judging, Forty, Hard

  Henry James (2015). “The Portrait of a Lady (Unabridged): From the famous author of the realism movement, known for The Turn of The Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The American, The Bostonian, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew…”, p.154, e-artnow

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• Learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.

  Edwin A. Abbott

  Hope, Self, Lessons

  Edwin A. Abbott, Thomas Banchoff, Seth Caplan, Jeffrey Travis, Dano Johnson (2009). “Flatland: The Movie Edition”, p.80, Princeton University Press

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• 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

  Real, Ignorance, Men

  Albert Camus (1948). “The Plague”, Vintage

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• In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Problem, Crisis

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• I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

  William Saroyan

  Wise

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• Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

  Virginia Woolf

  Clouds, Sharks, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

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• To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.

  Robertson Davies

  Teacher, Fall, Feet

  Robertson Davies (1992). “The Cornish Trilogy”, Penguin Group USA

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• Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

  Elizabeth McCracken

  Book, Fire, Race

  Elizabeth McCracken (2013). “The Giant's House”, p.250, Random House

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• All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Differences, Civilization, Political

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "The Value of Freedom". Chapter 2: "The Creative Power of a Free Civilization", 1960.

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• Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

  George Orwell

  War, Party, Intelligent

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.416, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

  Pema Chodron

  Buddhist, Walking Meditation, Mindfulness

  Pema Chodron (2003). “Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion”, p.29, Shambhala Publications

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• I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Future, Mean

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.159, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Believe, Moving, Men

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• If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Years, Doubt

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

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• The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

  Alice Sebold

  Time And Change, Damage, Layers

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• The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Understanding, Three, Boots

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• Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.

  Jhonen Vasquez

  Cutting, People, Survival

  "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac". Comic book by Jhonen Vasquez, 1995 - 1997.

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