The Other World (1657)
Context: The most competent physician of our world advises the patient to listen to an ignorant doctor who the patient thinks is very competent rather than to a competent doctor who the patient thinks is ignorant. He reason is that our imagination works for our good health, and as long as it is supplemented by remedies, it is capable of healing us. But the most powerful remedies are too weak when the imagination does not apply them.
“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.”
Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
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Richard Dawkins 322
English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941Related quotes
“Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.”
Source: The Brass Bottle (1900), Chapter 3, “An Unexpected Opening”
Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 12 (p. 94)
“… given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution….”
The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics
“It is better to live ten years at a thousand [miles per hour] than a thousand years at a ten”
From the lyrics of his song Vida Louca, Vida (Life, Crazy Life)
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.12
Context: Those who are ignorant and perverse in their thought are constantly in trouble and pain, because they cannot get as much of the superfluous things as a certain other person possesses. They as a rule expose themselves to great dangers... for the purpose of obtaining that which is superfluous and not necessary. When they thus meet with the consequences of the course which they adopt, they complain of the decrees and the judgements of God; they begin to blame the time, and wonder at the want of justice in its changes; that it has not enabled them to acquire great riches... for the purpose of driving themselves to voluptuousness beyond their capacities, as if the whole Universe existed only for the purpose of giving pleasure to these low people.