George Eliot Quotes

How can people be so stupid? I marvel at that. See, I think you have to work as being ignorant - and if you're gonna work at being ignorant, why not work at being informed?

If people are informed they will do the right thing. It's when they are not informed that they become hostages to prejudice.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.

I don't want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

Of all the bigotries that ravage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason, it is not rooted in faith, it aspires to no ideal.

… we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

There's not a pill you can take; there's not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.

I'm not dumb, I just wasn't educated.

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.

Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor. They condemn everything they don't understand.

There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.