George Eliot Quotes

I wish I had fair justification for not being as informed as I should be, but I don't.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

Evil feeds off a source of apathy, weak in the mind, and of course you have to be. Less than a man, more like a thing, no knowledge you're nothing, knowledge is king.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

I'm not trying to frighten you, but only a fool makes predictions based on ignorance; I am not that sort of fool.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force.

There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.

A dogmatic tone is generally inspired by abysmal ignorance. The man who knows nothing thinks he is informing others of something which he has that moment learnt; the man who knows a great deal can scarcely believe that people are ignorant of what he is telling them, and speaks more diffidently.

It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

Sometimes, we just don't know enough about what we are trying to achieve.

The fool will upset the whole science of astronomy.

Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

How little we know of what there is to know.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.