Blindness to Consequences Quotes

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

We can tend to be too ambitious when we're young, and a little blind.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.

My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now.

When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity - what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship with ethnic and sectarian divisions. When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.

Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.

Stupidity took me pretty far.