Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank Howard Clark

Ignorance doesn’t just sit there; it proselytizes. Frank Howard Clark’s line works because it flips the usual story we tell ourselves about not knowing: that ignorance is passive, a deficit, a blank space waiting to be filled. Clark treats it as an active social force, sustained less by scarcity of information than by the behavioral impulse to broadcast half-digested certainty. The target isn’t the uninformed so much as the performatively confident.

The wit lands in the sentence’s clean causal chain: “so much ignorance” isn’t blamed on complex systems, bad schools, or inaccessible knowledge, but on a simple human reflex - the eagerness to share. It’s a diagnosis of contagion, not absence. By implying that ignorance spreads faster than knowledge because it travels on emotion (ego, outrage, belonging), Clark anticipates the modern attention economy without needing to name it. People don’t share ignorance despite knowing better; they share it because it feels like knowing.

Subtext: ignorance is socially rewarded. The “eager” are chasing status - to be first, to be loud, to be aligned with a tribe. The line also quietly indicts audiences: ignorance can’t circulate without listeners who mistake volume for authority. Clark’s cynicism is efficient: it suggests that the problem isn’t merely education but incentives.

Contextually, it sits in an American tradition of aphoristic skepticism about public opinion and mass confidence - the dry recognition that crowds rarely require expertise, only a story. It’s funny because it’s sharp, and sharp because it’s familiar: the most contagious ideas are often the least examined.