"Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves."

"He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides."

"If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."

"...ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..."

"To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage."

"There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are"

"Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well."

"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic."

"It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance."

"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."

"It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon..."

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."

"Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it."

"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."

"Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective."

"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves."

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

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.

People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.

The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?