Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking
“Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.”
Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 263)
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Robert Charles Wilson 134
author 1953Related quotes

“Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XII

“The one thing that is more dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion of understanding.”
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 57, “Becoming Philosophical” (p. 226)

Geoffrey Nunberg (1983) The Decline of Grammar http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97mar/halpern/nunberg.htm, The Atlantic, December 1983 http://books.google.com/books?id=JuUmAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Psychoanalysis+is+unlikely+to+be+repealed+people+are+not+going+to+go+back+to+reading+novels+in+order+to+understand+themselves+and+their+lives%22&pg=PA38#v=onepage
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)
Context: The fundamentals of language are not understood to this day.... Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish.

“Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence?”
The Supplemental Nights (1888), quoted in The Life of Sir Richard Burton, Vol. II (1906), by Thomas Wright, p. 124
Context: The England of our day would fain bring up both sexes and keep all ages in profound ignorance of sexual and intersexual relations; and the consequences of that imbecility are particularly cruel and afflicting. … Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence?

Eminent Indians (1947)
Context: We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason.