ignorance

The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Abraham Lincoln tells somewhere that as a boy when he met an obscure or ambiguous sentence in his reading it threw him into a sort of rage. The fact is that this was simply a form of instinct for clear thinking which is found in every child and manifests itself abundantly to the perception of the good teacher. Far more important than any particular piece of knowledge, than geography or arithmetic or spelling, is this love of clearness in our mental life and instinctive hatred of confusion and obscurity. Let us learn to know what we know clearly and definitely, and also how we know it. The great intellectual need of men and women in the outer world is not so much more knowledge as it is better knowledge and better thinking. There is much philosophy in the humorist's remark, "It was never my ignorance that done me up, but the things I know'd that wasn't so." The great enemies of intellectual life are superstition, gullibility, and fallacious reasoning. A mere knowledge of facts, important as that is, is no safeguard against these. A conscious desire and resolve to think clearly is the true remedy. Our national success will depend largely upon the development of a generation of men and women who have formed a love and habit of clear thinking and who can do their part in solving the problems that confront civilized man today.

There was never a time in our history when ignorance of current affairs could be so dangerous.

Pride more often than ignorance makes us refuse to accept new ideas: finding the first places taken in the intellectual parade, we refuse to take the last.

The weakness of humanity is our blindness, a cultural blind spot which some call ignorance, in which a selfish and immature ego claims the world as ours and prevents us from seeing ourselves as a part of the world. Kinship with all life is a biological (evolutionary) fact, but our culture ways of doing, perceiving and relating, blind us to this reality.

He said that there was one only good, namely, knowledge; and one only evil, namely, ignorance.

Ignorance plays the chief part among men, and the multitude of words.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.