Susan Orlean Quotes

The truth hurts. It hurts to some people.

You know the problem, we don't want to believe what we know.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

I'm over-educated in the things I shouldn't have known at all.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

The saddest thing about any man is that he be ignorant …

Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion.

The possession of knowledge has always been dangerous.

There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.

We don’t like to face unpleasant reality. We want our leaders to tell us what we want to hear …. You cannot manipulate reality. Reality will real its ugly head

There is a sect in this country, which extends its influence, more or less, into all the ramifications of society, that explodes all kinds of knowledge not founded on personal experience; which inculcates that ignorance is the summum bonum; that the less one reads the more one thinks, and that the less he understands, the better he can act; that education beyond the precincts of common schools is allied to aristocracy, and incompatible with natural equality

There is one thing that is only good, namely, knowledge; and one only evil, namely, ignorance.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Geese are but Geese tho' we may think 'em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho' it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.

I wish I had paid more attention in my psych class in college. I would've had a broader vocabulary to draw from.

I used to be smart.

I dropped out of college in Hawaii just because I thought school was for losers. But school's really important.

What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.

Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off.

The most hateful grief of all human griefs is to have knowledge of a truth, but no power over the event.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.