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.

. . . 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.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

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...

A man is responsible for his ignorance.

[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...

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...

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

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough...

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

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.

Humans see what they want to see.

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.

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that’s more terrifying than the...

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.

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

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

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...

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.

A poet is a musician that can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no...

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.

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

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...

…After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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