Feigned Ignorance Quotes

The advantage of wisdom is that you can play dumb. The opposite is more difficult.

I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.

The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of peole who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand when in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer.

It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.

I act like I'm a bit stupid.

That's what's most annoying - when people in this industry act like they don't know me. And they say it in a way where you can just feel that it's shade.

I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

The most subtle of our acts is to simulate blindness for snares that we know are set for us.

It takes a very wise man to act the fool.

Let's not pretend that all of a sudden, this is some new system.