Quotes About Willful Ignorance

#1. Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.

David Horsey

#2. 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

#3. When you grow up surrounded by willful ignorance, you have to believe that mercy has it's own country and that it's round and borderless ...

Ani DiFranco

#4. There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

Elizabeth Moon

#5. The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth.

George MacDonald Fraser

#6. Gradually, however, she revealed a frustration with the willful ignorance that is an abiding human trait, an indignation at the cruelty that people visit upon one another. She might see the world as hopeless, but she believed it did not have to remain that way.

Dean Koontz

#7. Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama, however, such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.

Michelle Malkin

#8. I think that the root of Willful Ignorance, is Fear. We'll return to that in a minute. But the root of Fear, is Simple Ignorance, at least I think that our original Fear is rooted in simply not understanding the World around us: not knowing.

Steve Bivans

#9. Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.

Holly Lisle

#10. Knowledge tossed away," she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. "Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand." At

Richard K. Morgan

#11. Willful ignorance is something to be ashamed of, not proud.

Christina Engela

#12. Where resides the comforting knowledge of history's vast, cyclical sweep, the ebb and flow of wars and peace? Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls.

Steven Erikson

#13. There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.

Steven Magee

#14. The frantic stupidity of Wall Street's stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople.

Michael Lewis

#15. Bill O'Reilly calls his tv show the "No Spin Zone" but the man is practically a whirling dervish. He combines willful ignorance with a simple child-like faith in the system that, not coincidentally, has made him a millionaire.

Earl Lee

#16. Willful ignorance or resistance to alleged facts has been a big ingredient in any success I've had.

Rob Delaney

#17. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

#18. Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.

Jodi Picoult

#19. Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Benjamin Franklin

#20. An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

James A. Michener

#21. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov

#22. This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw."
"No it isn't," I said. "That book wasn't even written until a century after slavery was abolished."
"Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?

Octavia E. Butler

#23. But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Ray Bradbury

#24. It's much easier not to know things sometimes.

Stephen Chbosky

#25. There is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Joyce Carol Oates

#26. This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.

N.K. Jemisin

#27. Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?

Martin Freeman

#28. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar ... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Aldous Huxley

#29. The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you ... and then, the worse things get.

Frank Zappa

#30. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

Ayn Rand

#31. Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.

John Wray

#32. People are stupid. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.

Terry Goodkind

#33. (both circumvented the handicap of deafness by answering only those questions they believed had been asked & accepting only those answers they believed had been uttered - a stratagem embraced by many an American advocate)

David Mitchell

#34. It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

Noam Chomsky

#35. We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

Benjamin Franklin

#36. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Charles Darwin

#37. If it's a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.

Paul Murray

#38. Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#39. The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.

Aleister Crowley

#40. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Jared Diamond

#41. Because I do not wish to know," he says. "I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.

Erin Morgenstern

#42. I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and - if you're not careful - those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.

Brandon Sanderson

#43. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.

James S.A. Corey

#44. A man is responsible for his ignorance.

Milan Kundera

#45. Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.

Federico Fellini

#46. Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

Anne Rice

#47. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Richard Dawkins

#48. Humans see what they want to see.

Rick Riordan

#49. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

#50. More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

Richard Dawkins

#51. Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

Thomas A. Edison

#52. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

John Steinbeck