Error Quotes - page 4

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular” writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.”. (Stephen Jay Gould)
Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior-as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for” particular items of anatomy or behavior. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life. View quote
Lionel Trilling
There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
Error is the price we pay for progress. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
I do not agree or disagree in everything with either one party or the other. Because all seem to me to have some truth and some error, but everyone recognizes the other's error and nobody discerns his own. View quote
Michael Servetus
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself. View quote
William Godwin
The confusing of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error. (George Bernard Shaw)
Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. View quote
William Jennings Bryan
This is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty - the cause of humanity. View quote
William Jennings Bryan
It [the Iraq invasion] was absolutely an error. It's obviously clear the evaluation of weapons of mass destruction proved not to be correct. That's absolutely true and that's why we're not sending anybody to Iraq. View quote
Stephen Harper
The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. View quote
Orson Scott Card
The plan of "counting the chickens before they are hatched" is an error of ancient date, but it does not seem to improve by age. View quote
P. T. Barnum
Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom. View quote
Friedrich Schiller
You have to find out what's right for you, so it's trial and error. You are going to be all right if you accept realistic goals for yourself. View quote
Teri Garr
It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand. View quote
Joan Robinson
It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it. (Rebecca West)
Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other. View quote
Bret Easton Ellis
The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor; so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them. View quote
Camille Paglia
It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency. View quote
Norman Angell
It seems to me that it was well said by Madama Serenissima, and insisted on by your reverence, that the Holy Scripture cannot err, and that the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. But I should have in your place added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways; and one error in particular would be most grave and most frequent, if we always stopped short at the literal signification of the words. View quote
Galileo Galilei