Quotes about ignorance
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“And in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the Natural seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 12, p. 54
Leviathan (1651)

Men, Fear, Religion, Nature

“My idea of painting was that those yellow squares, being put on the wall as delineating a virtual square or rectangle, were involving the wall itself within the piece and, in this sense, compared to what is usually a work of art, a painting, this piece was somehow reversing the usual terms of the esthetic proposition. Usually, you see the painting and you ignore the wall. Here you had the wall coming through the painting — and the painting itself, the painted pieces, become a standpoint to make the wall appear.”

Robert Barry (1936) American artist

Robert Barry (1980) in: Alexander Alberro (2003). Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Alberro noted: "Barry has since discussed the way in which this painting accented the structural support..."

Art, Idea, Sense, Appearance

“To err is human. AI software modeled after humans will inevitably make mistakes. It is fine as long as the software learns from its errors and improves itself, which is something that humans ought to learn from AI. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, wrote in "Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays (1959): "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Men, World, Error, History

“I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side almost until the bitter end. It wasn't what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things.”

Traudl Junge (1920–2002) secretary to Adolf Hitler

Quoted in In Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer's Last Days (2005) by Armin D. Lehmann and Tim Carroll, p. 91, and in The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America (2009) by Jim Marrs, p. 342.

Way, Time

“I speak from ignorance.
Who once learned much, but speaks from ignorance now.”

Nathaniel Tarn (1928) American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator

Poem Last of the Chiefs published in: Nathaniel Tarn (1965) Old savage, young city. p. 18.

Learning

“Strange, that ignorance should be our best happiness in this life, and yet be the one we are ever striving to destroy!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life, Happiness

“The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

Or deplore them.
“New Year Letter”, p. 56
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 8, p. 105

People, Courage, Thinking, Waiting

“Well, I flung the window open an' I shouted, "Yes, that's right Millandra – I'm goin' to Greece for the sex; sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, an’ sex for supper." Well, she just ignored me but this little cab driver leans out an' pipes up, "That sounds like a marvellous diet, love." "It is," I shouted back, "have y' never heard of it? It's called the 'F' Plan."”

Willy Russell Shirley Valentine

Shirley, page 40.
Shirley Valentine (1986)

Love, Sex, Tea

“Tax revenues are up 59 percent since 1980. Because of our economic growth? No. During Carter's four years, we had growth of 37.2 percent; Reagan's five years have given us 30.7 percent. The new revenues are due to four giant Republican tax increases since 1981. All republicans rightly chastised Carter for his $38 billion deficit. But they ignore or even defend deficits of $220 billion, as government spending has grown 10.4 percent per year since Reagan took office, while the federal payroll has zoomed by a quarter of a million bureaucrats… big government has been legitimized in a way the Democrats never could have accomplished. It was tragic to listen to Ronald Reagan on the 1986 campaign trail bragging about his high spending on farm subsidies, welfare, warfare, etc… the IRS has grown bigger, richer, more powerful, and more arrogant. In the words of the founders of our country, our government has "sent hither swarms" of tax gatherers "to harass our people and eat out their substance." His officers jailed the innocent George Hansen, with the President refusing to pardon a great American whose only crime was to defend the Constitution. Reagan's new tax "reform" gives even more power to the IRS. Far from making taxes fairer or simpler, it deceitfully raises more revenue for the government to waste… I want to totally disassociate myself from the policies that have given us unprecedented deficits, massive monetary inflation, indiscriminate military spending, an irrational and unconstitutional foreign policy, zooming foreign aid, the exaltation of international banking, and the attack on our personal liberties and privacy.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Letter to chairman of the RNC http://www.textfiles.com/politics/ron_paul.txt Frank Fahrenkopf (March 1987). <br class="br">1980s

People, Way, Personality, Country

“His face was lit up with a divine look as lie uttered these words. Though not a handsome man, and ungainly in his person, yet in his enthusiasm he seemed the personification of manly beauty, and that sad face of his looked down in kindness upon these ignorant blacks with a grace that could not be excelled. He really seemed of another world.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 296

Lie, World, Sadness, Beauty

“To succeed as a pioneer you need two things: ignorance and purpose. Ignorance of just how tough the path ahead will be. And a driving purpose, which keeps you going nonetheless.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

26 November 2014, Twitter
Speaking & Features

“You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 229)

Life, God, Hope

“He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is.”

Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 2 (p. 25)

“The great error of the wisest known nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, was the preference invariable given to the imagined interests of an imaginary existence called the state or country, and the real interests of the real existences, or human beings, upon whom, individually and collectively, their laws could alone operate. Another error was the opposition in which they invariably placed the interests of their own nation to the interests of all other nations; and a third and greater error, was the elevating into a virtue this selfish preference of their own national interests, under the name of patriotism. The moderns are growing a little wise on these matters, but they are still very ignorant.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)

Law, Error, Imagination, Selfishness

“For to pass by those Ancients, the wonderful Pythagoras, the sagacious Democritus, the divine Plato, the most subtle and very learned Aristotle, Men whom every Age has hitherto acknowledged as deservedly honored, as the greatest Philosophers, the Ring-leaders of Arts; in whose Judgments how much these Studies [mathematics] were esteemed, is abundantly proclaimed in History and confirmed by their famous Monuments, which are everywhere interspersed and bespangled with Mathematical Reasonings and Examples, as with so many Stars; and consequently anyone not in some Degree conversant in these Studies will in vain expect to understand, or unlock their hidden Meanings, without the Help of a Mathematical Key: For who can play well on Aristotle’s Instrument but with a Mathematical Quill; or not be altogether deaf to the Lessons of natural Philosophy, while ignorant of Geometry? Who void of (Geometry shall I say, or) Arithmetic can comprehend Plato’s 218 Socrates lisping with Children concerning Square Numbers; or can conceive Plato himself treating not only of the Universe, but the Polity of Commonwealths regulated by the Laws of Geometry, and formed according to a Mathematical Plan?”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), pp. 26-27

Men, Children, Age, Law

“If the chiefs as leaders are going to earn and maintain the respect of the people of Fiji and preserve the uniqueness of the traditional and cultural structures they need to also recognise that the differences that exist between us all cannot and should not be ignored.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

Source: Senate speech, 24 August, 2005 (excerpts)

People

“Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

"Game III," p. 98
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Game”

History

“We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to five Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the four liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Horowitz speaks about Obama birth certificate doubters. [David, Horowitz, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/226474/obama-derangement-syndrome-david-horowitz, "Shut up about the birth certificate.", nationalreview.com, December 8, 2008, 2016-30-03]
2008

Justice, Problem, Thinking

“Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

comp.os.minix: LINUX is obsolete, 1992-01-29, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-12-31 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/9f3c7c165aacc83f?dmode=source, <br class="br">1990s, 1991-94

Time

“Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they're not going to be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I AM YOUR VOICE.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)

Women, Men, People, Communication

“Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour; as soon as women are allowed to answer the question "Would you like to squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as it takes to kill you?" they generally answer "No, thank you." This leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and ignorant of the alternatives.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

2000s

Women, Question, Baby, Dependency

“Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain.”

Euripidés Antiope

Antiope, Frag. 204

“Luisa knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Pioneers and Prospectors"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

People, Way, Question

“Americans are everywhere very decent, magnificent and ignorant. They are generous and lovable; they hog the earth and blight the land. In every hill and holler, highland, forest, meadow and plain they will continue to mingle and to learn, by intelligent transition or headlong catastrophe, to bind their lives to the resources of the land.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/7812.html (“America the Hard Way”), The Grapevine, cover story, Walk Across the USA), 1979-01-10

Intelligence, Learning

“I do not see any reason to assume that the heuristic significance of the principle of general relativity is restricted to gravitation and that the rest of physics can be dealt with separately on the basis of special relativity, with the hope that later on the whole may be fitted consistently into a general relativistic scheme. I do not think that such an attitude, although historically understandable, can be objectively justified. The comparative smallness of what we know today as gravitational effects is not a conclusive reason for ignoring the principle of general relativity in theoretical investigations of a fundamental character. In other words, I do not believe that it is justifiable to ask: What would physics look like without gravitation?”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)

Hope, Understanding, Thinking

“…ignoring the potential force possessed by a homogeneous race, bemused by the slogans of human equality, all parliaments adopted the dogma of infinite toleration. Tolerance toward the alien, the hostile, and the aggressive was seen as a highly humanitarian achievement, but was, as the history of the nineteenth and especially of our present century shows, merely an ever-greater abandoning of ourselves.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

"The Russian-Jewish Revolution", Auf Gut Deutsch magazine, February 1919. Quoted in Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. Routledge, 2013 (p.50). Also in Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp, Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation. University of Texas Press, 2014 (p.12).

Hostility, History

“The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Burke and the Edinburgh Phrenologists in The Atlas (15 February 1829); reprinted in New Writings by William Hazlitt, William Hazlitt and Percival Presland Howe (ed.), (2nd edition, 1925), p. 117; also reprinted in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Volume 20: Miscellaneous writings, (J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934), (AMS Press, 1967), p. 201

Science, Falseness

“What is falsely called Free Society, is a very recent invention. It purposes to make the weak, ignorant and poor, free, by turning them loose in a world owned exclusively by the few.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 108

World, Falseness

“Systems theory, in its concern for the whole and its emergent properties, ignores the components.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 183 as cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (2006).

“One may well wonder at the short-sightedness of those who ignore the characteristics which so clearly distinguish different things and declare that the laws of Solon and Lycurgus are all-sufficient to secure the greatest of republics, Athens and Sparta, because their sovereign authority is loyally accepted by those who enjoy that citizenship, yet deny that right reason, which is the fountain head of all other law, can impart freedom to the wise, who obey all that it prescribes or forbids.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

47.
Every Good Man is Free

Law, Freedom

“An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended — the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and that it must therefore have been intended.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

People, Feeling, Motivation

“From 1931 to 1935, I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my father's old college, Gonville and Caius, which was particularly strong in medicine and the law. However, after two years of law I switched to economics, much to my father's disappointment. At that time the world was in the depth of the great depression and my motive for wanting to change subject was the belief, bred of youthful ignorance and optimism, that if only economics were better understood, the world would be a better place.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

"Richard Stone - Biographical," 1984

Youth, World, Law, Disappointment

“Then, does everyone lives in fear?'
The firelight barely reached the huge man standing beside Raskan, and the deep voice that came from that vague shape sounded loose, unguarded. 'I would say, most of the time, yes. Fear that our opinion might be chalanged. Fear that our way of seeing things might be called ignorant, self-serving, or indeed evil. Fear for our persons. Fear for our future, our fate. Our moment of death. Fear of failing in all that we set out to achieve. Fear of being forgotten.”

Steven Erikson book Forge of Darkness

Forge of Darkness (2013)

Death, Fate, Fear, Way

“Almost all of the social tragedies occurring around the world today are caused by ignoring the basic biological laws of nature … The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.”

Jim Fowler (1930–2019) American zoologist

http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/events/past.html

Life, World, Law, Nature

“Why should we put up with the present evils in our society? As opposed to the society we are visualizing, the present one can be described as a diseased one. The evils are there on all levels, international and national, and even within the smaller units such as towns and families. Of course, the disease did not appear like a bolt from the blue, either yesterday, or last year. It is the result of factors that have deep roots and long lives. These consist of privations, discriminations oppressions, bigotries, hatreds, and hostilities; poverty, ignorance, hunger, and illiteracy. Each and all of these have been left to us as ar evil heritage from the past. The fundamental difference between our situation today and that of our forefathers is that now knowledge has enabled us to realize that these evils are neither natural nor inevitable in the same way as we have found that cholera or the bubonic plague are not necessary calamities.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

The Shah's Address to Harvard University - Creation of the Universal Welfare Legion - June 13, 1968 http://members.cybertrails.com/~pahlavi/harvard.html <br class="br">Speeches, 1968

Hunger, Hostility, Disease, Family

“That thing doesn’t care about you. It won’t reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That’s the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn’t care. Remember.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 2 “Aleph”, Chapter 2 (p. 51)
Against Infinity (1983)

Hate, Fear, Learning, Indifference

“Cybernetics, although not ignoring formal networks, suggests that an informal communications structure will also be present such that complex conversations at a number of levels between two or more individuals exist.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 79.

Communication

“The Lord took pity on me thousands upon thousands of times, because he saw within me that I was prepared, but that I was ignorant of what to do in view of my situation; because many were trying to prevent this mission. They were talking among themselves behind my back, and saying: 'Why is this fellow throwing himself into danger among enemies who know not God?' Not from malice, but having no liking for it; likewise, as I myself can testify, they perceived my rusticity. And I was not quick to recognize the grace that was then in me; I now know that I should have done so earlier.”

Saint Patrick (385–461) 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland

The Confession (c. 452?)

God, Time

“Corporate globalization and the economic agreements designed to entrench it have little to do with trade — and all but the most ignorant neo-liberal pundits surely know this too.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 30

“Anyone who dares to speak about an aether is regarded as an ignorant and backward mind and he can only lose his credibility in scientific circles, although in reality those who criticize him use the same concept of intermediate medium in other words, whether it be fields, an associated fluid, a probability fluid, a pilot fluid, a quantum fluid, etc.”

Maurice Allais (1911–2010) French economist; 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

[Maurice Allais, L'anisotropie de l'espace. La nécessaire révision de certains postulats des théories contemporaines. Les données de l'expérience, Editions Clément Juglar, Paris, 1997, 506, 2-908735-09-1]

Reality

“Soon there will be nothing left except the lying dreams of history, the miserable wreckage of our museums and picture-galleries, and the carefully guarded interiors of our aesthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and foolish, fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes on there, so pinched and meagre and cowardly, with its concealment and ignoring, rather than restraint of, natural longings; which does not forbid the greedy indulgence in them if it can but be decently hidden.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Signs of Change (1888), The Aims of Art

Life, Dreams, History, Lying

“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

An unpublished paper of 1907, as quoted in The Rising American Empire (1960) by Richard Warner Van Alstyne, p. 201; also quoted in On Power and Ideology (1987) by Noam Chomsky; accounts of this as being from a lecture of 15 April 1907 seem to be incorrect.
1900s

World

“It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

1
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

People, World

“Among the most striking things that I have learned is how much we have in common. I’ve sat down with people everywhere, discussing what was in their hearts and on their minds. And it doesn’t take long to find commonality, which is often overlooked, ignored, dismissed, and rejected otherwise.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Frontlines and Frontiers: Making Human Rights a Human Reality (December 6, 2012) http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/12/201618.htm <br class="br">Secretary of State (2009–2013)

People, Learning, Heart

“In the second year of my residence in Gottingen, I entered my name for a course of lectures on practical physics, against the advice of all my friends, but I have never regretted so doing, as there never has been, and probably never will be, a greater man at the university than Doctor Schroder, physician to the king, who gave, at that period, his celebrated lectures on practical physics. Schroder himself was astonished at the step I had taken; but when he perceived that I fully understood him, I became one of his favourite pupils; nor had I the advantage alone of receiving private lessons gratis, but he took me with him in most of his professional visits, where I had all the advantages of his great practice. Thus I caught a putrid fever which was then very prevalent; Schroeder attended me day and night, and giving up all hopes of my recovery, he observed to one of his friends, not thinking that I understood what he said, "The expansion of the sinews increases." "Then," answered I, in a quiet manner, "I shall die in four days, according to such and such a rule of Hippocrates: pray, prepare my father to receive the news of my death." However, immediately after, a sudden turn in the disorder taking place, I soon recovered; not so my memory, which I lost for a time, so that I had forgotten the names of my best friends; my nerves were so completely shaken, that I had no wish to recover. After my recovery, Professor Schroeder being himself attacked with the same fever, requested of his wife that no other physician than myself should attend him; but when he became light-headed, she called in all the physicians of Gottingen, and these gentlemen not agreeing in opinion respecting the treatment of the patient, this great and learned man fell a victim to ignorance and jealousy, April 21, 1772. I cannot think of this celebrated and good man without shedding tears of regret and gratitude.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Death, Jealousy, Hope, Thinking

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

Hunger, War, People, Truth

“[W]e prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing.... We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up-close and personal profiles" of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to life in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
Essays

Life, People, World, Way

“Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method … may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books, World, Error, Birth

“It may be, however, sufficient to say, that wherever the church has had power it has been a crime for any man to speak his honest thought. No church has ever been willing that any opponent should give a transcript of his mind. Every church in power has appealed to brute force, to the sword, for the purpose of sustaining its creed. Not one has had the courage to occupy the open field. The church has not been satisfied with calling Infidels and unbelievers blasphemers. Each church has accused nearly every other church of being a blasphemer. Every pioneer has been branded as a criminal. The Catholics called Martin Luther a blasphemer, and Martin Luther called Copernicus a blasphemer. Pious ignorance always regards intelligence as a kind of blasphemy. Some of the greatest men of the world, some of the best, have been put to death for the crime of blasphemy, that is to say, for the crime of endeavoring to benefit their fellow-men.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Death, Men, World, Intelligence

“Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 36.

Mathematics, Understanding, Science

“Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance and arrogance that pave the way to political collapse.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigrams%20Attention%20Deficit%20Democracy.htm

Way, Democracy

“To be accused of ignoring my roots is pig ignorant. Collins's racist comment has focused my mind on the fight and I will beat him.”

Chris Eubank (1966) British former professional boxer

Chris Eubank http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1010013,00.html#article_continue

Fight

“The bourgeois … necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Spring, Freedom

“The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.”

Sri Aurobindo book Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol

Savitri (1918-1950), Book One : The Book Of Beginnings

Idea

“When most of Europe was still illiterate, the Hutterites had established a system of primary schools. Among them education was compulsory. They believed that their movement depended on an educated people who could practice discipleship in light of New Testament teachings. Of course, the state churches felt no such need. Their religion was primarily in the hands of religious professionals. The layman's chief function in such ecclesiastical systems was to obey. For this purpose ignorance served as well as, if not better than, knowledge.”

William Roscoe Estep (1920–2000) American theologian

The Anabaptist Story (1996), p. 142

People, Education, School, Religion

“Eighteen centuries have passed since the Bible was finished. They have been centuries of great changes. In their course the world has been wrought over into newness at almost every point. But, to-day, the text of the Scriptures, after copyings almost innumerable and after having been tossed about through ages of ignorance and tumult, is found by exhaustive criticism to be unaltered in every important particular — there being not a single doctrine, nor duty, nor fact of any grade, that is brought into question by variations of readings — a fact that stands alone in the history of such ancient literature.”

Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907) American astronomer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 35.

Age, World, History, Literature

“They pass peaceful lives who ignore mine and thine.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 790
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Peace

“There may be some ground for believing that brontosaurs ate… soft foods. If the possibility of gizzard stones is ignored, the brontosaurs' dentition does seem little equipped to deal with meals of tougher plants. But there are no ground whatsoever for believing it of duckbills. The mouth of a duckbill dinosaur contained one of the efficient cranial Cusinarts in land-vertebrate history. Duckbill teeth and jaws were incomparable grinders, designed to cope with foods right inside the duckbill's oral compartment.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 160-161
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Food, History

“Twenty-five years ago this Republic was bearing and wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people; the narrowing and disintegrating doctrine of State sovereignty had shackled and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the national government; and the grasping power of slavery was seizing upon the virgin territories of the West, and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage.
At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every human heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and to save.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Men, God, People, Soul

“George Orwell once wrote: "And it's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

The quote is almost identical to a block of narration from the 1984 movie version of "1984", which is excerpted from various parts of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four with some paraphrasing.
2004, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

War, Effort, Past, Victory

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

People, Age, Religion, Art

“If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Life, Failure, Understanding, Nature

“The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Pitt's Reply to Walpole, Speech, March 6, 1741. This is the composition of Johnson, founded on some note or statement of the actual speech. Johnson said, "That speech I wrote in a garret, in Exeter Street." Boswell: Life of Johnson, 1741
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Youth

“Months later, Roger Cohen would write in The New York Time that preventing an attack on Banja Luka was "an acto of consummate Realpolitik" on our part, since letting the Federation [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] take the city would have "derailed" the peace process. Cohen, one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the was, misunderstood our motives in opposing an attack on Banja Luka. A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged the attack regardless of its human consequences. In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. Given the harsh behavior of Federation troops during the offensive, it seemed certain that the fall of Banja Luka would lead to forced evictions and random murders. I did not think the United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human suffering in order to take a city that would have to be returned later. Revenge might be a central part of the ethos of the Balkans, but American policy could not be party of it. Our responsibility was to implement the American national interest, as best as we could determine it. But I am no longer certain we were right to oppose an attack on Banja Luka. Had we known then that the Bosnian Serbs would have been able to defy or ignore so many of the key political provisions of the peace agreement in 1996 and 1997, the negotiating team might not have opposed such an attack. However, even with American encouragement, it is by no means certain that an attack would have taken palce - or, if it had, that it would have been successful. Tuđman would have had to carry the burden of the attack, and the Serb lines were already stiffening. The Croatian Army had just taken heavy casualties on the Sarva. Furthermore, if it fell, Banja Luka would either have gone to the Muslims or been returned later to the Serbs, thus making it of dubious value to Tuđman. There was another intriguing factor in the equation - one of the few things that Milošević and Izetbegović had agreed on. Banja Luka, they both said, was the center of moderate, anti-Pale sentiment within the Bosnian Serb community, and should be built up in importance as a center of opposition to Pale. Izetbegovic himself was ambivalent about taking the city, and feared that if it fell, it would only add to Croat-Bosnian tensions.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 166-167

Fear, Peace, Behavior, Communication

“Playing Paula in The Business of Strangers was extremely cathartic and wonderful for me because Patrick Stettner (the director) constantly encouraged me to be un-self aware. The character is very elusive and bold, but my experience of having people confuse bluntness with bitchiness has made me shy away from it, or it has made me too aware of the reactions I get from people. So Patrick undid all that by telling me to ignore what the response might be to Paula. It was almost like being a kid again, and it was a very empowering feeling.”

Julia Stiles (1981) American actress

MovieMaker, winter 2001.

People, Feeling, Business

“Judah Benjamin said, "The nations of Europe continue to abhor our policy, try as we will to convince them that we cannot do otherwise. Mr. Mason has written from London that Her Majesty's government might well have been willing to extend us recognition two years ago, were it not for the continuation of slavery among us: so Lord Russell has assured him, at any rate. Mr. Thouvenel, the French foreign minister, has expressed similar sentiments to Mr. Slidell in Paris." Slavery, Lee thought. In the end, the world's outside view of the Confederate States of America was colored almost exclusively by its response to the South's peculiar institution. Never mind that the U. S. Constitution was a revocable compact between independent states, never mind that the North had consistently used its numerical majority to force through Congress tariffs that worked only to ruin the South. So long as black men were bought and sold, all the high ideals of the Confederacy would be ignored.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 234

Men, World, Color

“I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it… I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In 1988, Richter painted a series of 15 works titled 'October 18, 1977.' It shocked Germany, especially left. The series was based on photographs of the anti-capitalist Baader-Meinhof group, which called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) and were in prison and died in 1977.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

People, Truth, Fear, Problem

“Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency.”

Robert Costanza (1950) American economist

Source: Toward a New Sustainable Economy, 2008, p. 46

Nature

“After an inferior man has been taught a doctrine of superiority he will remain as inferior as he was before his lesson. He will merely assume himself to be superior, and attempt to employ his recently-learned tactics against his own kind, whom he will then consider his inferiors. With each inferior man enjoying what he considers his unique role, the entire bunch will be reduced to a pack of strutting, foppish, self-centered monkeys gamboling about on an island of ignorance. There they will play their games under the supervision of their keeper, who was and will always be a superior man.”

Anton LaVey book The Devil's Notebook

The Devil's Notebook (1992)

Game, Learning

“The penalty for scientific irrelevance is, of course, that the statistician's work is ignored by the scientific community.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Science and Statistics (1976), p. 798

Penalty, Communication

“Wisdom and intellect is every man's friend, ignorance and illiteracy are his enemies.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 467.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Wisdom

“Several implications follow from Hayek's insights into the nature of capitalism.(a) The claim "I deserve my pretax income" is not generally true. Nor should the basic organization of property rules be based on considerations of moral desert. Hence, claims about desert have no standing in deciding whether taxation for the purpose of funding social insurance is just.
(b) The claim that people rocked by the viccisitudes of the market, or poor people generally, are getting what they deserve is also not generally true. To moralize people's misfortunes in this way is both ignorant and mean. Capitalism continuously and randomly pulls the rug out from under even the most prudent and diligent people. It is in principle impossible for even the most prudent to forsee all the market turns that could undo them. (If it were possible, then efficient socialist planning would be possible, too. But it isn't.)
(c) Capitalist markets are highly dynamic and volatile. This means that at any one time, lots of people are going under. Often, the consequences of this would be catastrophic, absent concerted intervention to avert the outcomes generated by markets. For example, the economist Amartya Sen has documented that sudden shifts in people's incomes (which are often due to market volatility), and not absolute food shortages, are a principal cause of famine.
(d) The volatility of capitalist markets creates a profound and urgent need for insurance, over and above the insurance needs people would have under more stable (but stagnant) economic systems. This need is increased also by the fact that capitalism inspires a love of personal independence, and hence brings about the smaller ("nuclear") family forms that alone are compatible with it. We no longer belong to vast tribes and clans. This sharply reduces the ability of individuals under capitalism to pool risks within families, and limits the claims they can effectively make on nonhousehold (extended) family members for assistance. To avoid or at least ameliorate disaster and disruption, people need to pool the risks of capitalism.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

Love, People, Family, Food

“It is on account neither of God's weakness nor ignorance that evil comes into the world, but rather it is due to the order of his wisdom and the greatness of his goodness that diverse grades of goodness occur in things, many of which would be lacking if no evil were permitted. Indeed, the good of patience would not exist without the evil of persecution; nor the good of preservation of life in a lion if not for the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

De Potentia (On Power) q. 3, art. 6, ad 4

Life, Wisdom, God, World

“Knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act II, scene iv.
Manfred (1817)

Happiness, Knowledge, Science

“True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Understanding, Knowledge, Indifference

“Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I. R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

Justice, Confidence, History, Motivation

“Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

Education, Idea, Fashion, Passion

“I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 1, Is There an Enduring Logic of Conflict in World Politics?, p. 2.

Age, World

“A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rorn god in the prow with a pound of incense.
The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke…. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.”

Tanith Lee book The Storm Lord

Book 4, “Hell’s Blue Burning Seas” Chapter 15 (p. 208)
The Storm Lord (1976)

God

“The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification — framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

"Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media" - Speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C. (7 April 1993)

“We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Address to White House Correspondents' Association, Washington, D.C. (12 February 1943)
1940s

Men, War, Faith, Way

“If ignorance is bliss, then I'm in heaven now.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"3's & 7's", Era Vulgaris (2007)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

“…ignorant of all that man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with education when they got it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Faith, Hope, Flowers

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 193

Soul, Nature, Suffering, Personality

“The new perspective also manifested itself in other ways: the shift of attention to sociologists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not with overall 'development', but with the one specific development, that of modern society; the tendency to be concerned with those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to ignore its Evolutionist aspects; and, recently and most characteristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society, and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications, oppositions and alternatives.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Thought and Change (1964)

Way

“When the tail of the tadpole drops off, it can live both in water and on land. When the tail of delusive ignorance drops off from man, he becomes free. He can then live in God and the world equally well.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 955

God, World, Water

“The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted; the second wilfully preferred.”

George Bancroft (1800–1891) American historian and statesman

"The Office of the People in Art, Government and Religion", p. 430
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855)

“Persecution always says, 'I know the consequences of your opinion better than you know them yourselves.' But the language of toleration was always amicable, liberal, and just: it confessed its doubts, and acknowledged its ignorance … Persecution had always reasoned from cause to effect, from opinion to action, [that such an opinion would invariably lead to but one action], which proved generally erroneous; while toleration led us invariably to form just conclusions, by judging from actions and not from opinions.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1790), quoted in Loren Reid, Charles James Fox: A Man for the People (1969), p. 261.
1790s

“There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

An account of the European Settlements in America (1757), pp. 19-20, in The Works of Edmund Burke in Nine Volumes, Vol. IX. Boston: Little, Brown (1839)
1750s

Disappointment

“Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Men, School, Home