A Quote by Thomas Paine

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance is tragedy. And ignorance is illness. It all stems from ignorance.
Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements of social life.
To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one's own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.
The Federal Government is rendered weak to do wrong, and powerful to do right: for, as soon as it begins to go wrong, it naturally begins to be divided against itself, and the three great wheels of its machinery exhaust their momentum, or wear each other out, in their friction against each other; while, as soon as it begins to go right, all the parts work harmoniously, and exhaust their full strength on the object of their action.
Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels.
Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.
The first reason for people's slavery is our ignorance, and above all, our ignorance of ourselves.
Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.
whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.
Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.
Because there is no greater evil than ignorance and the destruction of genius. Ignorance has been responsible for more death, more bigotry, and more sin than any other force. It is the destroyer of mankind.
The Government covers their own ass from things they fail to do to protect its own people from corporations that control the government, which is the reason we don't have checks and balances in this country. They checked how much balance they needed to influence congress and all the other branches of government in some way, shape, or form, and cash is king.
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
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