Ignorant Quotes - Page 11

• In an ignorant country, everything will try to drag you down! Stay firm, aim at the stars, keep going up and drag up the people who are trying to drag you down!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Country, Stars, People

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• In deep waters, you encounter only the wise and the brave; in shallow waters, the ignorant and the coward!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Wise, Deep Water, Brave

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• Sand can resist to water; but it cannot win. Ignorant can resist to knowledge; but it cannot win.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Winning, Water, Sand

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• Under the freest constitution ignorant people are still slaves.

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  People, Constitution, Slave

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• It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another.

  William Shakespeare

  Wise, Men, Disease

  William Shakespeare (2016). “King Henry IV Part 2: Third Series”, p.391, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• It is certainly of great importance for a general to keep his plans secret; and Frederick the Great was right when he said that if his night-cap knew what was in his head he would throw it into the fire. That kind of secrecy was practicable in Frederick's time when his whole army was kept closely about him; but when maneuvers of the vastness of Napoleon's are executed, and war is waged as in our day, what concert of action can be expected from generals who are utterly ignorant of what is going on around them?

  Antoine-Henri Jomini

  War, Army, Night

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• Neither do the ignorant love wisdom or desire to become wise; for this is the grievous thing about ignorance, that those who are neither good nor beautiful think they are good enough, and do not desire that which they do not think they are lacking.

  Plato

  Beautiful, Wise, Ignorance

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• You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people. And when you begin to have the mass of populus striving for something that's not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy go into...the maintenance of that which is worthless.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Real, People, Energy

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• Reason and truth have rarely prevailed against demagoguery when the audience is too ignorant to tell the difference.

  Charley Reese

  Differences, Reason, Audience

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• Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

  Herbert Spencer

  People, Atheism, Matter

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• [T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Athlete, Thinking, Media

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• Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

  Stephen King

  Baby, Children, Stupid

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• No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Intelligent, People, Easy

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant in this respect almost alone among the philosophers was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.

  Hannah Arendt

  Stupid, Philosophy, Exercise

  "The Life of the Mind". Book by Hannah Arendt, p. 13, 1978.

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• No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reality, Mind, Meaning Of Life

  "I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48, May 14, 2002.

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• 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

  Contradiction, Mathematics, Seems

  Richard Baxter (1830). “The Practical Works of Richard Baxter: with a Life of the Author and a Critical Examination of His Writings by William Orme”, p.206

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• Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.

  Herman Melville

  Principles, Germs, Spirit

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• The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance.

  Eric Hoffer

  Giving, Atheism, Chance

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• He seemeth to be most ignorant that trusteth most to his wit.

  Plato

  Wit

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• The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Numbers, Criticism

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Know that the difficulties which lead to confusion in the question what is the purpose of the Universe or of any of its parts, arise from two causes: first, man has an erroneous idea of himself, and believes that the whole world exists only for his sake; secondly, he is ignorant both about the nature of the sublunary world, and about the Creator's intention to give existence to all beings whose existence is possible, because existence is undoubtedly good.

  Maimonides

  Believe, Men, Ideas

  Moses Maimonides (1961). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.309, Courier Corporation

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• Even when a person suffers pain in consequence of a thorn having entered into his hand, although it is at once drawn out, it is a punishment that has been inflicted on him, and the least pleasure he enjoys is a reward; all this is meted out by strict justice; as is said in the Scripture, "all His ways are judgement" (Deut. xxxii. 4); we are only ignorant of the working of that judgement.

  Maimonides

  Pain, Hands, Punishment

  Moses Maimonides (2016). “Guide for the perplexed”, p.1088, Moses Maimonides

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• When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.

  Mark Twain

  Jobs, Indulge In, Gauges

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.4, Univ of California Press

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• Without a huge shock, the sleepy-head, ignorant Japanese will never wake up.

  Hiroo Onoda

  Wake Up, Sleepy, Shock

  "Words to Live By: Hiroo Onoda". Judit Kawaguchi, The Japan Times, January 16, 2007.

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• With childhood comes a brief grace period of ignorant bliss -- when you're not aware of the pain around you. That is the most special, truly unique time. It is the core of adult lament.

  Barry Privett

  Pain, Unique, Childhood

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