“I would far rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evil.”
Source: The Suppliants, line 453; comparable to "where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise", Thomas Gray, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, stanza 10
The Dawn http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1612/ <br class="br">The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) <br class="br">Context: I would be ignorant as the dawn<br>That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach<br>Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;<br>I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw —<br>Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
“I would far rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evil.”
Source: The Suppliants, line 453; comparable to "where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise", Thomas Gray, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, stanza 10
Giraut de Bornelh (1138–1220) French writer
Bel dous companh, tan sui en ric sojorn
Qu'eu no volgra mais fos l'alba ni jorn,
Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire
Tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire
Lo fol gilos ni l'alba.
"Reis glorios", line 31; translation from Peter Dronke The Medieval Lyric (1996) p. 176.
Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer
Source: The Arkadians
Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale
Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 6 (p. 66)
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice
"Holmes-Pollock Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932" (2nd ed., 1961), p. 109.
Often quoted as "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity" and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..
1930s
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.”
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author
Sometimes attributed to Hawking without a source, but originally from historian Daniel J. Boorstin. It appears in different forms in The Discoverers (1983), Cleopatra's Nose (1995), and introduction to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1995)
Misattributed
“I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.”
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
“But who would force the soul tilts with a straw
Against a champion cased in adamant.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Part III, No. 7 - Persecution of the Scottish Covenanters.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)