Frederic Bastiat Quotes

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things.

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.

He doubts nothing who knows nothing.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

All men are ignorant, just on different subjects.

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.

A man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

The most ignorant are the boldest conjecturers.

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

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

We ought not to believe those who today, adopting a philosophical air and with a tone of superiority, prophesy the decline of culter and are content with the unknowable in a self-satisfied way. For us there is no unknowable, and in my opinion there is also non whatsoever for the natural sciences. In place of this foolish unknowable, let our watchword on the contrary be: we must know - we shall know.

Well, what we know Is not what they tell us We're not ignorant, I mean it, And they just cannot touch us Through the powers of the Most-High We keep on surfacin' Thru the powers of the Most-High We keep on survivin'.

I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task.

I know what I'm doing. And I even know when I don't know what I'm doing. Then there are people who don't want to know that you know what you're doing.

For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

People are bloody ignorant apes.

That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.

Never think that you already know all. However highly you are appraised, always have the courage to say to yourself-I am ignorant.