Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it’s fun, and that’s how I grow as an actor.

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

I love diversity.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

It’s very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

To be social is to be forgiving.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

I hate the idea of genres.

A boy carries out suggestions more wholeheartedly when he understands their aim.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.