“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.”
― Plato

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

“Humans see what they want to see.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“People are stupid. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true.”
― Terry Goodkind, Wizard’s First Rule

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“It’s much easier not to know things sometimes.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“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 in a book.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“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.”
― Richard Dawkins

“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”
― Isaac Asimov

“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.”
― Charles Darwin

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick: Book 4, Liber ABA

“Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we’re the ones who securely tied the knot.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“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 to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”
― James A. Michener

“…the 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 old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

“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

“Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know.”
― Federico Fellini

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon

“. . . 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.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“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 him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio