Quotes : Ignorance
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
(Isaac Asimov / 1920-1992)
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
(Isaac Asimov / 1920-1992)
"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
(Ambrose Gwinett Bierce / 1842-1914 / The Devil's Dictionary)
""I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortur."
(Daniel J. Boorstin, American historian and author / 1914 - 2004)
"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means."
(Clarence Darrow / 1857-1938)
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
(Charles Darwin / 1809-1882 / The Descent of Man / 1871)
"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."
(Thomas Edison / 1847-1931)
"If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789 / System of Nature / 1770)
"All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation... "
(Robert Green Ingersoll / 1833-1899)
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
(Thomas Jefferson / 1743-1826)