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Fallibility Quotes

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Fallibility Quotes

“Humanity demands from their leaders the courage to sin. To take account of reality means to take account of the devil. And to take account of the devil without degenerating and slipping into him is a difficult skill; it is the true problem of an ethic of balance, of the true center, not the ethic of simply negating what resists the demands of honesty, conviction, and love.”

PoliticsLeadershipSinCourageMoralityEthicsDevilFallibility
Book:Grenzen der Gemeinschaft
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“Frodo stirred. And suddenly his heart went out to Faramir. ‘The storm has burst at last,’ he thought. ‘This great array of spears and swords is going to Osgiliath. Will Faramir get across in time? He guessed it, but did he know the hour? And who can now hold the fords when the King of the Nine Riders comes? And other armies will come. I am too late. All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.’ Overcome with weakness he wept. And still the host of Morgul crossed the bridge.”

DoubtDespairHumanFrodoFallibilityLotrFaramirThe Two TowersCirith UngolMinas Morgul
Book:The Two Towers
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“These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in their words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation. Of course, individual English words and phrases are held up to and examined to the point of a knife.”

GodReligionLanguageBibleWordsEnglishTranslationFallibility
Book:God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
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“Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.”

GodChanceGodlyGodsNothingInactionGodlinessFallibility
Author:Steven Erikson
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“If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was.”

NeedsUnderstandingAtheismLogicClarityHistorianBrillianceWantsMessageFallibilityAtheist ArgumentSilent GodArgument From God S SilenceInternet InfidelsRichard Carrier
Book:Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith
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“as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.”

Human NatureChristiansFrailtyFallibilitySnoopy
Book:The Gospel According to Peanuts
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“The first step to empathy and compassion is realising the similarities between yourself and those that are suffering; the first step to forgiveness is realising that we're all human and we all share the same capacity for fallibility and foible; the first step to growth is to recognise the value of things that are outside your current mental frameworks so that you can grow into them.”

SufferingGrowthCompassionHuman NatureEmpathyForgivenessHuman ConditionComfort ZoneDifferenceSimilarityForgiveness QuotesFallibility
Book:Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness
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“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much; Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule— Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!”

ReasonPoetryHumanityDoubtMankindHumilityEnlightenmentErrorFallibility
Book:An Essay on Man
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“Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.”

ScienceAmbitionScientistMetaphorImprovementScientific TheoryFallibilityScientific ProgressDestructibilitySwedish Academy Of Sciences
Author:Paul Sabatier
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“Even as to himself, a man cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. At the same time, beyond these characteristics of his own subject, made up of mere appearances, he must necessarily suppose something else as their basis, namely, his ego, whatever its characteristics in itself may be... Now man really finds in himself a faculty by which he distinguishes himself from everything else, even from himself as affected by objects, and that is reason. This being pure spontaneity is even elevated above the understanding. For although the latter is a spontaneity and does not, like sense, merely contain intuitions that arise when we are affected by things (and are therefore passive), yet it cannot produce from its activity any other conceptions than those which merely serve to bring the intuitions of sense under rules, and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without this use of the sensibility it could not think at all; whereas, on the contrary, reason shows so pure a spontaneity in the case of what I call "ideas" [Ideal Conceptions] that it thereby far transcends everything that the sensibility can give it, and exhibits its most important function in distinguishing the world of sense from that of understanding, and thereby prescribing the limits of the understanding itself.”

ReasonNature Of ManFallibility
Book:Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals: & The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
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“The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.”

HumilityUncertaintyFallibilityMorey
Book:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
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“A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there.”

LeadershipCompassionHumilityAmerican Civil WarFallibilityAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln Quotes
Book:The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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“Failures are like alarm clocks. Alarm clocks wake us up from our dreams and remind us that we have to go to work. Failures wake us up from our dreams and remind us that we have to live as we really are; mortal and fallible living beings.”

Human BeingsDreamsFailureMortalityFallibilityHybris
Book:NOVEL PHILOSOPHY: New ideas about Ethics, Epistemology, Science and the sweet Life
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“Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”

WayNeedsHumansHandsOrderGivenPleasureMoralityExtremesHypocrisyAgreementAllowingStrictUnspokenHuman NeedsGreaseFallibility
Author:Janet Malcolm
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“Arrogance is inimical to prudential reasoning, to accepting that for all we know and learn we also accumulate ignorance of the questions we do not ask, the risks we do not and cannot comprehend. In short, arrogance is what causes us to ignore our fallibilities.”

KnowsAsksCausesAcceptingRiskIgnoranceArroganceReasoningFallibility
Book:Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam
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“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

IfsTryingArtLife IsFearCourageFailureConfidenceOvercomingRecoveryConquerLive LifeBe BraveNo FearAttemptingFear Of FailureOvercoming FearHave CourageBeing StrongTaking RisksSuccess FailureBe CourageousHave No FearOvercoming FailureFear And CourageFear CourageFailure In LifeFailure InspirationalFears Of LifeFallibilityNo FailureConquering FearInspirational CourageRisks In LifePersonal Courage
Book:The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, 1872-1886: With a Memoir by His Sister-in-law, J. Van Gogh-Bonger ...
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“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”

GivingMindFirstsMeanMadeFactsAcceptingBecomingTenLimitsAuthorityCapacityErrorsAcceptedDeep ThoughtAutonomyExpandingZombieLearning From MistakesInfallibleMindlessCorrectingWise WomenRedeemingOmniscientFallibilityInfallibilityOmniscience
Book:Atlas Shrugged
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“At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.”

ShouldBelieveCommunityAwarenessReadyConstantInspiredTalesRecognizingCriteriaFallibility
Book:Serendipities: Language and Lunacy
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“There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility.”

HumansPersonsMotivationValuesSituationMoralPrinciplesJudgingIntegrityArgumentAppreciationDuesAcceptedCoreCrueltyCompromiseMeritFairnessAvoidanceBrooksFallibilityIdiosyncrasiesNo Compromise
Author:Sonia
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“When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when, above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority.”

MenShouldReasonDreamLastsDifferencesClassAtheismHonestProduceExerciseDegreesAuthorityJudgmentArgumentConstantGuiltPositive AtheismConclusionAppealsAppreciatedFallibility
Book:History of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe
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“Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.”

HumansRaceAtheismAmountErrorsExtremesPositive AtheismHuman RaceCatholicismHypothesisAllowanceFallibility
Book:History of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe
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“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”

KnowsHumansMadeReasonTermWorkHuman BeingsGroupsJudgmentOrganizationWorkersRateLengthRelativeSolePromotionSurveillanceFallibilityRetention
Author:Mary Barnett Gilson
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“You and I may only be mortals, with all the foolishness and fallibility that that state implies, but we're mortals made in the image of heaven. The gods can't do their work without us. So let's be bold, in their cause and in our own. It's our job, we humans, to make manifest that which is unmanifest-and to raise into consciousness, in this material dimension, that which had been known before only in heaven.”

HumansMayMadeStatesJobsHeavenCausesConsciousnessKnownMaterialsRaisesMortalsDimensionsManifestFoolishnessFallibility
Author:Steven Pressfield
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“One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations.”

MenHumansUseLanguageGivenCommonRaceHumilityDemandManagementMethodComplexesCommon SenseCraftsLimitationHuman RaceSoftwareEngineeringProvenAdaptationAttemptingDoseIntricateFallibilityHandiwork
Author:Fred Brooks
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