Infallibility Quotes

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith. (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes. View quote
George Orwell
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience. View quote
Ayn Rand
If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. View quote
James Frazer
In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility. View quote
John Buchan
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation. View quote
Richard Feynman
That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry. View quote
Joseph Glanvill
Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. View quote
Naomi Weisstein
I, for one, see this in much the same way I saw our denial of rights - as nothing short of a denial of our humanity. Not one of us has the "gospel," nor are our opinions based upon some revealed precepts to be taken as faith. As thinking, rational individuals, not one of us can claim infallibility, even from the overwhelming advantage of hindsight and Monday-morning quarterbacking. View quote
Clarence Thomas
Do I believe that my views or opinions are perfect or infallible? No, I do not. But in admitting that I have no claim to perfection or infallibility, I am also asserting that competing or differing views similarly have no such claim. And they should not be accorded a status of infallibility or any status that suggests otherwise. (Clarence Thomas)
'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death. View quote
Marquis de Sade
The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who'd been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis's purposes, he'd never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility. View quote
Poul Anderson
Leninism is orthodox, obdurate, irreducible, but it does not contain so much as a hint of formalism, canon, not bureaucratism. In the struggle, it takes the bull by the horns. To make out of the traditions of Leninism a supra-theoretical guarantee of the infallibility of all the words and thoughts of the interpreters of these traditions, is to scoff at genuine revolutionary tradition and transform it into official bureaucratism. It is ridiculous and pathetic to try to hypnotize a great revolutionary party by repetition of the same formulae, according to which the right line should be sought not in essence of each question, not in the methods of posing and solving this question, but in formation of a biographical character. View quote
Leon Trotsky
All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility. View quote
Alastair Reynolds
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth. View quote
Boris Pasternak
Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious influence theory of atonement, of the infallibility of the Bible, I leveled all the strength of my brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its cruelties, its oppressions. View quote
Annie Besant
Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee. View quote
Rosa Luxemburg
Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government's facade of infallibility, and you remove it's people's faith. (Dan Brown)
It is only as the temporary representatives and servants of the people that we meet here, we bring no hereditary status or gift of infallibility, and none follows us from this place. View quote
Gerald Ford
Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. View quote
Stewart Brand
Diversity of opinions on theoretical points is never dangerous to the party. There are for us no bounds to criticism, and however great our respect may be for the founders and pioneers of our party, we recognize no infallibility and no other authority than science, whose sphere is ever widening and continually proves what it previously held as truths to be errors; destroys the old decayed foundations and creates new ones; does not stand still for an instant; but in perpetual advance moves remorselessly over every dogmatic belief. View quote
Wilhelm Liebknecht
We claim no infallibility for our presentations. View quote
Charles Taze Russell