Ignorance And Prejudice Quotes

Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated. ~ Kofi Annan

They condemn the past for its ignorance and prejudice, while knowing nothing at all about the past and not much more about the present ~ Maria Theresa Of Austria

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice. ~ Lord Chesterfield

One condemns the whole past as a time of ignorance and prejudice, while knowing nothing of that past and very little of the present. ~ Julia P. Gelardi

I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom. ~ H.G.Wells

When you want to organize knowledge. you will be careful to base the classification upon essential qualities. You will thus derive classes in which the members have the greatest amount of resemblance to one another and the greatest amount of difference from the members of other classes. But suppose that, instead of organizing knowledge, you set out to organize ignorance and prejudice. You will then do precisely the opposite.You will keep the classification vague and flexible, so that it can be made to include just whatever individuals you choose. ~ Barrows Dunham

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand... ~ Rush

..there was nothing to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper, and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your weapons- you must think out new replies to his objections and provide yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways. ~ Upton Sinclair

Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state - however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor. ~ George Orwell

But if it be true, as every prospect assures us, that the human race shall not again relapse into its ancient barbarity; if every thing ought to assure us against that pusillanimous and corrupt system which condemns man to eternal oscillations between truth and falsehood, liberty and servitude, we must, at the same time, perceive that the light of information is spread over a small part only of our globe; and the number of those who possess real instruction, seems to vanish in the comparison with the mass of men consigned over to ignorance and prejudice. We behold vast countries groaning under slavery, and presenting nations in one place, degraded by the vices of civilization, so corrupt as to impede the progress of man; and in others, still vegetating in the infancy of its early age. We perceive that the exertions of these last ages have done much for the progress of the human mind, but little for the perfection of the human species; much for the glory of man, somewhat for his liberty, but scarcely any thing yet for his happiness. In a few directions, our eyes are struck with a dazzling light; but thick darkness still covers an immense horison. ~ Nicolas De Condorcet

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind. ~ Joseph Addison

Modern man's narrow-mindedness is best shown in his belief that there is no riddle before him. His wisdom is the sum of his knowledge and his ignorance, of which he is not aware, he accepts it as knowledge. Even in the face of the greatest mystery, he behaves self-consciously and conceitedly. He does not even see the problem. It is in this that the true measure of his ignorance and prejudice is manifested. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Faced with so much ignorance and prejudice currently I can only comment that Facebook is a breeding ground for the worst fruits of our coarse personality. ~ J.B.Alves

Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand ~ Neil Peart

I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. ~ Mark Twain

Roving dogs do not indicate the civilisation or compassion of the society. They betray on the country the ignorance and lethargy of its members. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn't know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne. ~ Frank Cottrell Boyce

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss. ~ Cesar Nascimento

Love, the future is thine. Death, I make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that is may come that we are about to die. ~ Victor Hugo

Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice. ~ Jennifer Stone

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce

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. ~ Aldous Huxley

She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. ~ Harper Lee

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is. ~ Liu Cixin

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. ~ Thomas Jefferson

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The only truly new ideas [the right] has come up with in the last twenty years are (1) supply side economics, which is a way of redistributing the wealth upward toward those who already have more than they know what to do with, and (2) creationism, which is a parallel idea for redistributing ignorance out from its fundamentalist strongholds to those who know more than they need to. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction, ~ Charles Lindbergh

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" ... Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots. ~ Gordon Allport

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water. ~ Anatole France

I worry that I upset people without meaning to. I worry that I don't check my privilege enough. I worry about people being imprisoned for crimes they didn't do. I worry about human rights abuses. I worry about prejudice and politics and pollution and the world my children, and their entire generation, are inheriting from us. I worry about all of the species going extinct because of humans. I worry about my carbon footprint. I worry about all of the pain in the world that I am not actively able to stop. I worry about how much I'm wrapped up in myself, which makes me even more wrapped up in myself. ~ Matt Haig

Let's not be afraid of stilling our mind and having mercy with ourselves, and allowing us patience to recover from our dazzling unawareness and ignorance or from the inferno of overwhelming hassle. ("The umbrella") ~ Erik Pevernagie

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off. ~ John Trudell

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers
or should I say, nurses?
will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Try again, Andrew," Hannah said patiently.
For the rest of the long morning, we played. By the time we quit, my thumb hurt, my neck and shoulders ached, and my finger felt permanently crooked. It looked like I wasn't going to beat Andrew anytime soon.
Chucking me under the chin, Hannah laughed. "Goodness, don't look so glum. It's a game, Andrew, not a matter of life and death."
I turned away quickly and began gathering the marbles. The things the Tylers said in ignorance were downright scary. ~ Mary Downing Hahn

The best way to protect young black, brown, men of color, women of color, is to actually stop profiling, stop the prejudice, and stop the judgment first. ~ Hill Harper

The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

Sure, you can choose the safety and predictability of the cage, forfeiting the adventure God has destined for you. But you won't be the only one missing out or losing out. When you lack the courage to chase the Wild Goose, the opportunity costs are staggering. Who might not hear about the love of God if you don't seize the opportunity to tell them? Who might be stuck in poverty, stuck in ignorance, stuck in pain if you're not there to help free them? Where might the advance of God's kingdom in the world stall out because you weren't there on the front lines? ~ Mark Batterson

I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God. ~ Donald Miller

It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy. ~ Zeena Schreck

The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth? ~ John Milton

The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance. ~ Lewis Thomas

Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Parents who can feel, who are conscious of their feelings and realize that uncontrolled anger, though it may be triggered by the child, usually has little to do with it, are less in danger of acting out their rage in the guise of pedagogy. I use the words "guilt" and "victim," rather than "causes" and "effects," as I am often politely urged to do, advisedly. Children are turned into victims by people, by their parents, not by some kind of automaton. These people have no right to behave as though they were merely destructive automatons and adhere to their ignorance, even though conventional wisdom and even moral and religious teachings confirm them in their actions by preaching forgiveness to their victims. One day the effects of such opinions will be seen in all their destructiveness. ~ Alice Miller

In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. ~ Michael Crichton

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice. ~ Martin Guevara Urbina

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. ~ Ellen G. White

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt ... None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word ... Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos ... ~ H.G.Wells

It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government ~ Thomas Paine

When we forget our essential similarities, we forget how to get along, and that cannot but lead to prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, conflict. ~ G. Norman Lippert

One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous ... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice. ~ Aldous Huxley

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.
"Well, Eve
it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the on ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Personal ignorance should be admitted, but it should not be allowed to place limits and bounds on the ways 'and means of revelation. ~ Jeffrey Lang

When you die, no matter who you are,
you may be remembered for your courage
or despised for your cowardice,
you may be remembered for your gratitude
or despised for your bitterness,
you may be remembered for your benevolence
or despised for your meanness,
you may be remembered for your modesty
or despised for your arrogance,
you may be remembered for your peace
or despised for your violence,
you may be remembered for your compassion
or despised for your ruthlessness,
you may be remembered for your mercy
or despised for your vengeance,
you may be remembered for your love
or despised for your unkindness,
you may be remembered for your strengths
or despised for your weaknesses,
you may be remembered for your virtues
or despised for your unrighteousness,
you may be remembered for your knowledge
or despised for your ignorance,
you may be remembered for your wisdom
or despised for your foolishness,
and you may be remembered for your accomplishments
or despised for your incompetence.

When I die, I want to be remembered
for my smile, not my tears;
for my laughter, not my pain;
for my joy, not my grief;
for my patience, not my anger;
for my friends, not my enemies;
for my mind, not my riches;
for my heart, not my titles;
for my soul, not my achievements;
for my triumphs, not my tragedies; ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We all have demons inside us, Nick. The Tsalagi have an old saying - every heart holds two wolves. One is the white wolf, who is made up of love, kindness, respect, decency, compassion, and all the things that are good in life. The black wolf is born of jealousy, hatred, pettiness, prejudice, vindictiveness, and all the poisons of the human personality. The two constantly war with each other for dominance. And one day, one wolf will overtake and devour the other. - Acheron ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

It seems to me that he died from a combination of two of the oldest and most insidious killers of all: ignorance and avarice. ~ Robert A. Norman

One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know, because they do not care to know: they keep out of the way of knowing it – and then plead their voluntary ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart. ~ John Wesley

After an inferior man has been taught a doctrine of superiority he will remain as inferior as he was before his lesson. He will merely assume himself to be superior, and attempt to employ his recently-learned tactics against his own kind, whom he will then consider his inferiors. With each inferior man enjoying what he considers his unique role, the entire bunch will be reduced to a pack of strutting, foppish, self-centered monkeys gamboling about on an island of ignorance. There they will play their games under the supervision of their keeper, who was and always will be a superior man. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

This is Necropolis Enforcement. Drop any non-organic weapons, put your arms, flippers, claws, tentacles, or any other extremities up, and walk, slither, stomp, crawl, et cetera, out of the darkness or be exterminated with extreme prejudice. ~ Gini Koch