willful-ignorance

A man is responsible for his ignorance.

. . . 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.

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.

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.

Humans see what they want to see.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

A fool can't help but be a fool, but when others follow, he makes a fool of us all.

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.

Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and__f you__e not careful__hose lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.

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.

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

The real plague is willful ignorance and education can't cure that.

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

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.

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.

[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.