Quotes about ignorance

The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.

When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old fashioned phrase from Kant.

The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.

Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world’s citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons. (Page 194-195)

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.

You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse.

Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?

That was the coward’s route. Wishing for ignorance.

I shouldn’t be so hard on our neighbors. They’re petty, yes, but it’s the pettiness of the ignorant. I’m not disgusted by them. I’m disgusted by the one who manipulates them.

“My circumstances are unusual, Brightness.”

“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.”

No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance.