#willful-ignorance

"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."

"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."

"I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book."

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

"Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance."

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."