Top 50 Ignorance Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.”

— Donald Miller

Also featured in: Choices Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

2. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

— George Carlin

Also featured in: Funny Quotes

3. “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

— Socrates

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Study Quotes, Philosophical Quotes

4. “I only know one thing, and that is I know nothing.”

— Socrates

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Philosophical Quotes, Intelligent Quotes

5. “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

— George Carlin

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Hilarious Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

6. “When you know better you do better.”

— Maya Angelou

Also featured in: Inspirational Quotes, Change Quotes, Education Quotes, Positive Life Quotes

7. “Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”

— Richard P. Feynman

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Sarcastic Quotes, Intelligent Quotes

8. “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

— Confucius

Also featured in: Education Quotes, Learning Quotes, Famous Quotes, Wise Quotes

9. “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”

— Mark Twain

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Short Quotes, Short Quotes About Life, Funny Motivational Quotes

10. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

— Derek Bok

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Intelligent Quotes, Smart Quotes, Teaching Quotes, College Quotes

11. “Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Also featured in: Education Quotes, Study Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Teacher Quotes, Back-to-School Quotes

12. “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Also featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Smart Quotes

13. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”

— Wayne W. Dyer

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Clever Quotes, Karma Quotes

14. “Don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance or my kindness for weakness. Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

Also featured in: Kindness Quotes, Mistake Quotes

15. “If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Also featured in: Integrity Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Philosophical Quotes, Wise Quotes

16. “They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Intelligent Quotes

17. “Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Quotes About Humanity

18. “Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.”

— Plato

Also featured in: Morality Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Evil Quotes

19. “The worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance.”

— Jim Rohn

20. “Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.”

— Hippocrates

21. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

— George Orwell

Also featured in: Sarcastic Quotes, Freedom Quotes, Quotes About War, Government Quotes

22. “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

23. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

— Charles Darwin

Also featured in: Science Quotes

24. “Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance is tragedy. And ignorance is illness. It all stems from ignorance.”

— Jim Rohn

25. “Once a person stops searching for information and self-knowledge, ignorance sets in.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

26. “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

— H. L. Mencken

Also featured in: Demotivational Quotes, Disrespect Quotes

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

— Confucius

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Struggle Quotes

29. “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

— Thomas Sowell

Also featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Quotes About Laughter

30. “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.”

— Plato

Also featured in: Knowledge Quotes

31. “Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance.”

— Nikola Tesla

32. “Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

33. “Stupidity is a talent for misconception.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

34. “Trust that little voice in your head that says ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if...’; And then do it.”

— Duane Michals

Also featured in: Curiosity Quotes, Quotes About Trust

35. “You have been a prisoner of a little pond. I am the ocean and its turbulent flood. Come, merge with me, leave this world of ignorance.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Poetry Quotes, Sufism Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Creative Quotes

36. “Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.”

— Dale Carnegie

37. “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

Also featured in: Hard Work Quotes, Fear Quotes

38. “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.”

— Warren Buffett

Also featured in: Financial Success Quotes, Clever Quotes, Investing Quotes

39. “Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”

— James Allen

Also featured in: Personal Responsibility Quotes

40. “Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Also featured in: Intelligent Quotes, Philosophy Quotes

41. “Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Also featured in: Science Quotes

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

— Benjamin Franklin

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Intelligent Quotes, Teaching Quotes

43. “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

— Lewis Carroll

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Impossible Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Different Quotes

44. “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiation – creation – there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans...”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Also featured in: Commitment Quotes

45. “Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Also featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Smart Quotes

46. “Be careful, you are not in Wonderland. I’ve heard the strange madness long growing in your soul. But you are fortunate in your ignorance, in your isolation. You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose – lest we die, unbloomed.”

— Allen Ginsberg

47. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

48. “If any man can convince me and bring home to me that which I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Also featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes, Truth Quotes, Quotes About Home

49. “Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”

— Ayn Rand

Also featured in: Evil Quotes

50. “In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That’s probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We’re out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.”

— Vera Rubin