Is it not better to be in ignorance than to believe falsely?
Knowledge Quotes
Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, John Locke, Samuel Johnson and Einstein are all near the top, which gives the page its character: mostly people who thought about how we know things, rather than about how to feel clever. Johnson gives the most useful single line, in Boswell’s Life (1791): “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Wittgenstein, in On Certainty (1969), says that knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
A lot of the quotes people look for here are flagged. “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing” is credited to Socrates; see the note on the Wisdom page. “Contempt prior to investigation” is credited to Einstein, and a line about putting the Lord at every turn in the refuge of a miracle is credited to Galileo.
Innocence might be bliss, but ignorance was demonstrably hell.
Ignorance, which in behavior mitigates a fault, is, in literature, a capital offense.
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part.
Ignorance of Scripture is the root of every error in religion, and the source of every heresy.
The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than the savants of St Petersburg in their learning.
Ignorance is a chink in the armor a knowledgeable enemy can exploit at will.
The one thing that is more dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion of understanding.
Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand.
The roots of human wrongdoing reach far deeper than mere ignorance or social malformation.