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"Ignorance and irrationality are resilient. People resist attempts to reach consensus or to learn more. They dig in their heels. Attempts to eradicate ignorance and irrationality frequently make these problems even worse. Political participation, including democratic deliberation, is more likely to corrupt and stultify than to ennoble and enlighten us." Jason Brennan   "Plato lures the readers of his early dialogues into a cunningly induced state of confident ignorance. He instills confidence by lulling us into believing that we know better than Socrates' interlocutors. He makes us presume that, unlike them, we see Socrates' point; he makes us imagine that we agree, if not with every single one of Socrates' views, at least with his general outlook on life. And he displays our ignorance by showing that in fact we do nothing of the sort. He forces us to see that although we claim to agree with Socrates' uncompromising demand to devote our life to the pursuit of reason and virtue, we remain ultimately indifferent to it." Alexander Nehamas   "We have destroyed everything with a barbarous precipitation, and when we wanted to reconstruct, we brought to light a ridiculous ignorance of all the means of rebuilding. We didn't know how to put either men or things in working order; we wanted to begin a new edifice by the roof, without thinking to establish the foundations. Enormous scaffolds have been necessary to make works which will collapse at the moment when they are believed to be completed." Joseph-Baptiste-Antoine Suard   "The circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides." Thomas Babington Macaulay   "The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black. No better reasons can be given for enslaving those of any color than such as baron Montesquieu has humorously given; as the foundation of that cruel slavery exercised over the poor Ethiopians; which threatens one day to reduce both Europe and America to the ignorance and barbarity of the darkest ages. Does it follow that it is right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool, instead of Christian hair, as it is called by those whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face. Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast. It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own." James Otis   "No country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed-door policies. We have tasted this bitter experience and our ancestors have tasted it. In the early Ming Dynasty in the reign of Yong Le when Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open. After Yong Le died the dynasty went into decline. China was invaded. Counting from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the opium wars, through 300 years of isolation China was made poor, and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance." Deng Xiaoping   "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, its continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses. Villagers who themselves feared to ascend the mountaintops located their departed ones on the impenetrable heavenly heights." Daniel Boorstin   "Mr Jobbles had for many years been examining undergraduates for little goes, and great goes, and had passed his life in putting posing questions, in detecting ignorance by viva voce scrutiny, and eliciting learning by printed papers. He, by a stupendous effort of his mathematical mind, had divided the adult British male world into classes and sub-classes, and could tell at a moment's notice how long it would take him to examine them all. His soul panted for the work. Every man should, he thought, be made to pass through some 'go.' The greengrocer's boy should not carry out cabbage unless his fitness for cabbage-carrying had been ascertained, and till it had also been ascertained that no other boy, ambitious of the preferment, would carry them better." Anthony Trollope   "It is not sufficient to contrast the imperfect adjustments of unfettered private enterprise with the best adjustments that economists in their studies can imagine. For we cannot expect that any state authority will attain, or even whole-heartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure, and to personal corruption by private interest." Arthur Cecil Pigou   "Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on." Ron Rosenbaum   "Tyranny ever was, and ever will be, the true cause of the corruption of morals, and the habitual calamities of men; who, almost always fascinated with religious notions, and metaphysical fictions, instead of turning their eyes to the natural and obvious causes of their misery, attribute their vices to the imperfection of their nature, and their unhappiness to the anger of the gods. They offer up to heaven vows, sacrifices, and presents, to obtain the end of their sufferings, which, in reality, are chargeable only to the negligence, ignorance, and perversity of their guides, the folly of their institutions, their silly customs, false opinions, irrational laws, and above all, to the want of knowledge." Paul-Henri Thiry   "Auden, Spender, those bhoyos, all yellow twicers; not one of them with a tithe of Carlile's courage and integrity. Unlike those pseudos I am of—not for—the working class and like Carlile know nothing of the so-called higher classes save only that they are cheats and murderers, battening like vampires on the masses. The illiteracy of the literate! But Glasgow's hordes are not even literate save a man or two; all bogged down in words that communicate no thought, only mumbo-jumbo, fraudulent clap-trap, ballyhoo. The idiom of which constructive thought avails itself is unintelligible save to a small minority and all the rest wallow in exploded fallacies and cherish for immortal souls their gross stupidity, while in the deeper layers of their ignorance who delves finds in this order—Scotland, other men, themselves." Christopher Grieve   "Perhaps it is only natural that in the exuberance generated by the successful advances of science the circumstances which limit our factual knowledge, and the consequent boundaries imposed upon the applicability of theoretical knowledge, have been rather disregarded. It is high time, however, that we take our ignorance more seriously." Friedrich Hayek   "Their object seems to be to disgust their slaves with freedom by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan is to make bets on their slaves as to who can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery." Frederick Douglass   "To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in all times; yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself, in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air and season." Edmund Burke   "In fine, daily experience sufficiently evinces that there is no discovering, at least no declaring of truth in most places but at the hazard of a man's reputation, employment, or life. These circumstances cannot fail to beget the woeful effects of insincerity, dissimulation, gross ignorance, and licentious barbarity." John Toland   "Nothing could reveal more astoundingly the prevailing ignorance of what a society is and what methods of dealing with it are rational; for it is not possible to experiment with a society and just drop the experiment whenever we choose. The experiment enters into the life of the society, and never can be got out again. Therefore, whenever there is a mania for interference, the doctrine of non-interference is the highest wisdom. It does not involve us in any argument with the people who know that the way to national prosperity is through plenty of greenbacks, or another dose of tariff, or who see what direful results will flow from lack of money if we do not have a 'double standard.' It does not compel us to argue that everything now is ideally good. It simply means that, whatever may be unsatisfactory in the world, we know we would rather take our chances of managing for ourselves than to submit our interests to the manipulation of social doctors." William Graham Sumner   "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Richard Feynman   "Lust of wealth and trust in it, vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude instead of nobleness, besides that faith natural to backwoodsmen, 'lucum ligna,' perpetual self-contemplation issuing in passionate vanity, total ignorance of all the finer and higher arts and of all that they teach and bestow, and the discontent of energetic minds unoccupied, frantic with hope of uncomprehended change and progress they know not whither—these are the things that have 'failed' now in America; and yet not altogether failed; it is not collapse, but collision—the greatest railroad accident on record, with fire caught from the furnaces, and Catilines quenching 'non aqua sed ruina.'" John Ruskin   "In Erasmus, in Rabelais, in the Utopia one recognizes the very accent of the angry belle-lettrist railing, as he rails in all ages, at 'jargon' and 'straw-splitting.' On this side Pope and Swift are true inheritors of the Humanist tradition. It is easy, of course, to say that Laputa is an attack not on science but on the aberrations of science. I am not convinced. The learning of the Brobdingnagians and the Horses is ruthlessly limited. Nothing that cannot plead the clearest immediate utility—nothing that cannot make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—wins any approval from Swift. Bentley is not forgiven for knowing more Greek than Temple, nor Theobald for knowing more English than Pope. Most of the history of Europe is a mere wilderness, not worth visiting, in which 'the monks finished what the Goths begun.' The terror expressed at the end of the Dunciad is not wholly terror at the approach of ignorance: it is also terror lest the compact little fortress of Humanism should be destroyed, and new knowledge is one of the enemies. Whatever is not immediately intelligible to a man versed in the Latin and French classics appears to them to be charlatanism or barbarity. The number of things they do not want to hear about is enormous." Clive Staples Lewis