Social Ignorance Quotes

I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'

I'm certainly not ready to go changing the world overnight right now. I'm completely uninformed about a lot of our issues, a lot of the nation's issues, not just Indigenous issues.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

The problem is that my generation was pacified into believing that racism existed only in our history books.

Still how unenlightened and ignorant are the very nations we term civilized!

Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

[On her father, Ronald Reagan:] How do you argue with someone who states that the people who are sleeping on the grates of the streets of America 'are homeless by choice'?

I think most of us are far removed from what goes on in our jails and the system. When I started working on 'Lucknow Central,' it was the first time I gave it some thought.

My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.

The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry - it just gets dirtier.

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

The main thing that I hate the most is ignorance, like the prejudice problems of America. I know it is worse in some other countries. But I wish I could borrow, like from Venezuela or Trinidad, the real love of color-blind people and bring it to America.

But Catherine did not know her own advantages - did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

A lot of times, when you don't have to deal with some of the circumstances that affect minority culture, you just don't think they exist. This is a conversation I have with lots of my white friends all the time.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

In the 'era of colorblindness,' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we, as a nation, have 'moved beyond' race.

Human creatures, living in the circle of their intimates and friends, are too apt to remain in ignorance of the comments and instructions which may be made of what they say and do in the world at large. I entertain a great horror of this ignorance.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.

If science produces no better fruits than tyranny... I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighbouring savages are.

To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius.

I was just oblivious to the fact that the country scene was socially backward and politically opposite of everything I am.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.