Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

Blue’s line lands like a small, merciless law of the mind: knowledge is sticky, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make you innocent, it makes you dangerous. The phrasing does two things at once. “It is not possible” isn’t advice; it’s a verdict. Then the awkward, almost childlike turn of “unknow what you do know” mimics the mental contortion it describes: the strain of trying to reverse an insight, to crawl back into a simpler self.

The sting is in the pivot: “the result of that is fanaticism.” Blue isn’t treating fanaticism as excess belief so much as a defensive maneuver. When a person has glimpsed complexity, doubt, or contradiction and can’t tolerate what it costs, the temptation is to slam the door on the new knowledge and double down on certainty. Fanaticism becomes a kind of self-administered anesthesia: louder slogans, stricter boundaries, a purer tribe, anything to drown out what you already know is true.

As a clergyman, Blue is also quietly indicting religious (and secular) piety that relies on willful innocence. He’s warning that faith’s real enemy isn’t skepticism; it’s denial. The subtext is pastoral and political: communities that demand members “unsee” hard realities - about history, harm, desire, ambiguity - don’t preserve devotion, they manufacture rigidity. Blue’s insight explains why people can become most extreme right after an encounter with doubt: not because they learned nothing, but because they learned something they can’t bear to live with.