Top 100 Human Ignorance Quotes
#1. To inquisitive minds like yours and mine the reflection that the quantity of human knowledge bears no proportion to the quantity of human ignorance must be in one view rather pleasing, viz., that though we are to live forever we may be continually amused and delighted with learning something new.
Benjamin Franklin
#2. A great paradox which should God make us understand, we will weep, laugh, wonder and ponder is the paradox of human ignorance
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#4. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.
Sam Harris
#5. The reason that history so often repeats is not only human nature, but also human ignorance.
Glenn Beck
#6. dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them.
Karen Armstrong
#7. Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#8. Most books are about aspects of human knowledge - Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about
Piero Scaruffi
#10. Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
Sam Harris
#11. The only thing worse than human ignorance is human pride in that ignorance.
George Takei
#12. The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
Lewis Thomas
#13. Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
Sam Harris
#14. The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.
Clarence Darrow
#15. Each human being can at once be a fighter and forgiver. When self-doubt tortures him, he most play the role of a fighter. And when his own ignorance humiliates him, he must play the role of a forgiver.
Sri Chinmoy
#16. We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.
D.H. Lawrence
#17. History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma
Aldous Huxley
#18. Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.
Amartya Sen
#19. Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it!
Wynton Marsalis
#20. The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
M. Scott Peck
#21. I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.
Joseph O'Neill
#22. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.
Sam Harris
#23. Contemporary medical technology is not an advancement in medicine- it indicates the failure of Caucasian medical science and is a sign of ignorance. Technology cannot replace the human ability to diagnose disease by looking, touching and smelling to perform treatments without drugs.
Llaila Afrika
#24. Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.
Magnus Hirschfeld
#25. Books were links that spanned such missing human bonds or even times of savagery and its resulting ages of ignorance.
Terry Goodkind
#26. .. The point of human life is to travel from ignorance to wisdom. In ignorance there is fear. In wisdom there peace and tranquillity.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#27. No matter how challenging the ensuing process may become at times, the inner light and love in the human heart always has the power to dispel darkness and ignorance.
William Keepin
#28. Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.
Anthony De Mello
#29. It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
Voltaire
#30. No human being can be more human than another human being. I liberate you from my ignorance.
Maya Angelou
#31. There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
G.K. Chesterton
#32. When the brain's potential is fully unleashed, there can be few if any limitations. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't up-to-date with the latest scientific findings on the brain and is exhibiting their ignorance. For the brain's potential is the human potential ...
James Morcan
#33. We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.
John Trudell
#34. Human values are born with man. They are not got from outside. Man in his ignorance is not aware of these values. when man sheds his ignorance, he will experience his divine nature.
Sathya Sai Baba
#35. The locust continues
to devour the world
Hunger persists
Love lurches on
listing to starboard
like a ship in a bottle
Human longing goes on
Loneliness a curse
Innocence persists
Ignorance persists
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#36. And she knew she was not sure, she would never be sure, because uncertainty is the essence of the human condition, and death is the one barrier beyond which we cannot see. There is no hope but faith, no knowledge but the acceptance of ignorance.
Yet still she hoped that one day she would know.
Jan Siegel
#37. 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
#38. No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.
John C. Wright
#39. I am not a snob, because I know opulence doesn't stamp out ignorance and unhappiness.
Sarina Bowen
#40. Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.
Edward De Bono
#41. I am the One, and I see all.
But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.
Dean Koontz
#42. Curiosity killed the cat, but where human beings are concerned, the only thing a healthy curiosity can kill is ignorance.
Harry Lorayne
#43. Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.
Woodrow Wilson
#44. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance ...
William Landay
#45. [U]nder even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance.
Sandor Marai
#46. More than Christianity, the religion of Victorian times was a belief in human advance - the conviction that freed from ignorance and superstition, humanity could expand its power and be master of its destiny.
John N. Gray
#47. If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding.
Ted Koppel
#48. The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.
William Sloane Coffin
#49. I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#50. He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.
Martin Luther
#51. The evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;
Albert Camus
#52. The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#53. There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a traveling from grave to grave.
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
#54. Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
William Hazlitt
#55. Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book ... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.
Stendhal
#56. The point of the spiritual revolution is not to become a good Buddhist, but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and to be a buddha.
Noah Levine
#57. Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.
Abhijit Naskar
#58. Human mind & news Media work on the same principle: Unsatisfied with the past; worried about future; ignorant about the present moment.
Saurabh Sharma
#59. If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.
Charlie Pierce
#60. The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice.
Tom Feiling
#61. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human
Kim Stanley Robinson
#62. When the human being says:
'It is not true ... '
He may mean:
'I don't know about it, so I think it is untrue.'
Or:
'I don't like it.
Idries Shah
#63. What's happening outside church walls is happening inside church walls. It is all part of the human experience. Ignorance and lack of education about sex, sexual orientation, gender identities, and human sexuality in general have led to harmful assumptions and poor pastoral counsel.
Kathy Baldock
#64. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.
Edith Wharton
#65. I felt the human disease that is ignorance suddenly leave my body. Just like that. Like a hot, desperate piss after a long car ride.
J.A. Redmerski
#66. No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
Eduardo Galeano
#67. Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character.
John Stuart Mill
#68. My heart goes out to the families of innocent children who were killed today in Pakistan!! I do not accept a world where kids are killed for wanting an education! This violence and ignorance has to stop!!!! It starts with all of us treating all human beings with dignity and respect!!
Madonna Ciccone
#69. The failure of the family court system in America is a national scandal. Sadly, the mainstream media, whether out of ignorance or fear, refuses to cover it. That media silence means that every day, these American human rights abuses continue to occur.
Garland Waller
#70. Science and Religion are two vividly different realms of the human mind. They work differently at the molecular level, but the purpose of both is alleviation of the mind from the darkness of ignorance.
Abhijit Naskar
#71. Accessibility to information never been so advanced and easy in entire human history as it is now and we have no excuse for ignorance.
Baris Gencel
#72. As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favor of those that could be romanticized by whimsy and imagination.
Eleanor Catton
#73. Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
Daniel J. Boorstin
#74. To understand the seriousness of abortion, one must know the physiology of human development. Ignorance of these facts is in part why mothers are willing to have an abortion and the general public allows abortions on demand.
John S. Feinberg
#75. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H.P. Lovecraft
#76. There are only two energies at the core of the human experience: love and fear. Love grants freedom, fear takes it away. Love invites full expression, fear punishes it. Love invites you, always, to break the bonds of ignorance.
Neale Donald Walsch
#77. I would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the power of flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions that I had not yet understood to be more than just means, by my lack of understanding
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#78. Knowledge and education are the key to this human tragedy which is a bonfire of hate fueled by ignorance.
Christina Engela
#79. Ignorance and fear create the gods, enthusiasm and deceit adorn them, and human weakness worships them.
Graham McNeill
#80. I was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him.
Dean Koontz
#81. Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.
Stephen Hawking
#82. The sun of truth rises in the human being and illuminates his world when he lifts his mind from the darkness of ignorance and selfishness into the light of wisdom and altruism
Samael Aun Weor
#83. I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
Isaac Newton
#84. Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?
CrimethInc.
#85. All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance
and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not
to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is
supported by no appearance of probability.
David Hume
#86. It is logical to say that ignorance seems to be the root cause of all human suffering.
Kat Lahr
#87. There are some people who start off knowing very little about the world and end up years later knowing even less. Never underestimate the capacity of the human mind for ignorance. Mr. Woodhouse found this very amusing.
Alexander McCall Smith
#88. As the moon, though darkened with spots, gives us a much greater light than the stars that sewn all-luminous, so do the Scriptures afford more light than the brightest human authors. In them the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance.
Robert Boyle
#89. Whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.
Henri Barbusse
#90. There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis
#91. Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#92. Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better - not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.
Chuck Klosterman
#93. 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.
Brandon Sanderson
#94. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.
Leo Tolstoy
#95. Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.
Charlie Munger
#96. Oh, come on. A vamp marrying a human gets the fanged ones all upset, and Eve made herself look like the ultimate fang-anger to all the humans by putting a ring on one, so what did you expect exactly? Flowers and parades? This is Texas. We're still figuring out how to spell tolerance.
Rachel Caine
#97. What is a flaw but a human mistake, or an ignorance that sees without options?
Janny Wurts
#98. I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#99. There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.
Francis S. Collins
#100. The art depicts duplicity and depravity," he said, "but its purpose is to counteract the human tendency to fill in the blanks with goodness. We do that instinctively, and in ignorance, to compensate for breaches of the soul so deplorable that we can barely fathom them." I
Anne McAneny
