"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know."
— Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl)

"Living is Easy with Your Eyes Closed."
— John Lennon

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
— George Orwell (1984)

"He who stands for nothing will fall for anything."
— Alexander Hamilton

"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
— Harlan Ellison

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
— Stephen W. Hawking

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
— Derek Bok

"That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance."
— Hippocrates

"He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'
'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'
'What's so negative about it?' I said.
'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.
'"Ignorance,"' I said."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"When we set out on the path, we always have a fairly clear idea of what we hope to find. Women are generally seeking their Soul Mate, and men looking for Power. Neither party is really interested in learning. They simply want to reach the thing they have set as their goal."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one."
— Benjamin Franklin

"Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like."
— Noam Chomsky

"He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Fear always springs
from ignorance."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Osama, baah!" Bashir roared.

"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever."
— Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time)

"Herein lies the tragedy of the age:
Not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty.
Not that men are wicked, - who is good?
Not that men are ignorant, - what is truth?
Nay, but that men know so little of men."
— W.E.B. DuBois

"A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance."
— Anatole France

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?'"
— Aldo Leopold

"...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed."
— Milan Kundera

""The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.""
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows."
— Sydney J. Harris

"Science is the topography of ignorance."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance."
— Adlai Stevenson

"ذو العقلِ يشقى في النعيمِ بعقلهِ ......وأخو الجهالةِ في الشقاوةِ ينعمُ "
— أبو الطيب المتنبي

"I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes."
— Jack Whyte (Uther)

"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

"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil--or else an absolute ignorance."
— Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)

"Ignorance is ultimately the worst enemy of a people who want to be free."
— Jonathan Hennessey (The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation)

"Not knowing is not a crime. Crime is remaining complacent in your ignorance."
— Kratos (Tales Of Symphonia)

"The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance."
— Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street)

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
— Bernard Berenson

"Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

"Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint’s days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical"
— Eliza Lynn Linton

"The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance"
— Lewis Thomas

"Ignorance is a lot like alcohol: the more you have of it, the less you are able to see its effect on you."
— Jay M. Bylsma