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Michael Austin Quotes

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Famous Michael Austin Quotes

“Arguing in good faith means being willing to consider the possibility that we are wrong and that the person we are arguing with is right. It means constantly monitoring and trying to control for our own biases. And it means being willing to revise our positions once we realize that we can no longer defend them. This doesn't require self-doubt or indecision. But it does require humility and enough respect for reality to understand that we really will be wrong from time to time. Once we admit this, we should also be able to see that always acknowledging the possibility that we might be wrong is the only way to make sure that we are always at least right about something.”

HumilityBiasesMeeknessGood Faith
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Finally, I must acknowledge, before anybody beats me to it, that I am not particularly good at doing most of the things that I recommend in this book. I am often outraged, I rarely resist flattery, I frequently argue in ways that are unnecessarily critical and hurtful, and I have a genuinely difficult time displaying charity or kindness. The figure I refer to as 'me' in these pages in an aspirational me and not the real thing, and anything I have learned, I have learned by doing things badly. As Robert Browning's Andrea del Sarto mused, 'Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”

HumilityGoalsAspirationsAcknowledgments
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“You are wrong. You are profoundly and disturbingly wrong about a spectacularly large number of things. You accept facts that are not facts, values that are incompatible with each other, and a fair number of truly dumb ideas about how to change the world. If you ever really understood the extent of your wrongness, you would never trust another word you said. You need not feel shamed about this. I am wrong too; everybody is wrong about a lot of things. Given the number of things that all of us believe (or do not believe to be facts, the number of things that we consider (or do not consider) valuable, and the number of policies that we think (or do not think) will work, there is no possible way that anybody is going to be right about everything - or even most things. You already accept this about 99.9999 percent of the human population. You know perfectly well that everybody else is wrong about a lot of things. And if you really think about it, you will realize that you are probably not the only person in the world who is always right.”

HumilityMistakesFalse Beliefs
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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