Motherhood Quote by Francois Rabelais

“Ignorance is the mother of all evils” lands like a provocation disguised as a proverb. Rabelais, a Renaissance cleric with a comedian’s scalpel, isn’t just condemning stupidity; he’s attacking the systems that cultivate it. Calling ignorance a “mother” is the trick: evil isn’t framed as a freak accident or a demonic intrusion but as something born, raised, and normalized. It’s domestic. It has routines. It gets fed.

The subtext is pointed for a clergyman. Rabelais wrote in a culture where religious authority often monopolized knowledge, policed reading, and treated curiosity as a moral hazard. His line quietly flips that logic: the real spiritual danger isn’t asking too many questions; it’s being kept too pliable to ask any at all. “Mother” also implies lineage: cruelty, fanaticism, corruption, and scapegoating aren’t separate vices so much as siblings with the same origin story. If you want fewer monsters, start upstream with education, literacy, and the freedom to think.

There’s cynicism here, too, in the way it compresses moral complexity into cause-and-effect. Rabelais knows people prefer simple villains. He offers one, then smuggles in a political argument: ignorance is useful to power. Evil doesn’t always need hatred; it often just needs darkness, permission, and a crowd that never learned to read the fine print.