It's good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.
I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects werefor, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized.
Whatsoever misfortunes there are Here in this world or in the next, They all have their root in Ignorance And in the accumulation of Longing and Desire.
Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal.
To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.
Monks, when ignorance is abandoned, and knowledge arises in the monk, with the ending of ignorance and the arising of knowledge he clings neither to sense-pleasures, nor does he cling to views, nor to precepts and vows, nor to a Self-doctrine. Not clinking, he is not disturbed; not disturbed, he attains individually nibbana.
Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.