Spoken on his return to India from England as recorded in From Colombo to Almora (1904), Calcutta, p. 221
Context: No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English, and, on this platform, are present English friends who can bear witness to the fact, but the more I lived among them, saw how the machine is working, the English national life, mixed with them, found where the heart-beat of the nation was, the more I loved them. There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more than I do. You have to see what is going on there, and you have to mix with them. As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.
“It is to the advantage of despots to keep people ignorant; it is to our advantage to make them intelligent. We must lead all of them gradually away from ignorance.”
Directives on the Cultural Revolution (1966-1972)
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Mao Zedong 181
Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of… 1893–1976Related quotes
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 57.
Context: Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. … Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust.
Original French: Le secret de la liberté est d'éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie est de les retenir dans l'ignorance
Source: Oeuvres, Volume 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=iSMVAAAAQAAJ p. 253.
Alberuni, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1
From Alberuni's India
Hall-of-Fame player Dolph Schayes
http://www.nba.com/encyclopedia/players/bill_russell.html
“The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.”
As quoted in Human Rights and Freedoms in the USSR (1981) by Fedor Eliseevich Medvedev and Gennadiĭ Ivanovich Kulikov, p. 221
Original: Le secret de la liberté est d'éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie est de les retenir dans l'ignorance
Variant: The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Source: Public statement (November 1792), quoted in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre (1840), Volume 2, p. 253 http://books.google.com/books?id=iSMVAAAAQAAJ
“We used the home advantage to our advantage.”
7-Jan-2006, DCFC website
The quotes come thick and fast.
Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 5
Context: Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.