Fallibility Quotes

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? (Carl Sagan)
To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action. View quote
Ludwig von Mises
Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty. View quote
Eliot Spitzer
Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. View quote
Carl Rogers
Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility. View quote
Tom Hiddleston
Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions. View quote
Gerald Brenan
The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past. View quote
Lewis Thomas
One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. View quote
Carl Sagan
As a parent, the only thing I am absolutely certain of is my own fallibility. (Ayelet Waldman)
Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again. View quote
Vincent van Gogh
Often in this our life do we begin by cursing men and end by loving them. A sense of the common fallibility of all flesh makes us kin. No man is lovable who is invincible. View quote
Neville Cardus
Human fallibility recognised, God's sovereignty trusted; these are also the only stable foundations for human beings in society. View quote
Justin Welby
On the abstract level, I have turned the belief in my own fallibility into the cornerstone of an elaborate philosophy. View quote
George Soros
All businesses operate below their true potential. That is unavoidable, given the fallibility of human beings. View quote
Robert Heller
When we go to the Bible we should keep in mind that the basic principles of the Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern day knowledge. So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. But the basic principles are applicable to my life and I don't find any conflict among them. View quote
Jimmy Carter
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. View quote
Steven Pressfield
Science is [...] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. View quote
Carl Sagan
They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. View quote
Carl Sagan
When we look at the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument, it seems on the surface that we are completely full of ourselves and yet at the same time terribly dubious, sometimes completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility as a cause célèbre. We show no faith in ourselves by accepting this idea that we've caused Global Warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. These are hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of the few whom offer us the way to salvation. (Anthony Watts)
The thing I believe in most in the world is my own fallibility, so I am willing to believe that I may be wrong too. View quote
Ayelet Waldman
Although there are aspects of mugging which are continuous, permanent, old-fashioned, the new word is describing a typically new thing. That new thing, as is recently being admitted, is connected with the change in the composition of the population of certain of our great cities. To use a crude but efficient word for it, it is racial. Its prevalence is due to the fact that an implant into our society has changed a community that was previously homogeneous into a community which is no longer homogeneous and self-identifying... I was delighted with the terminology of the Metropolitan Police report to the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration: ‘Experience has taught us the fallibility of the assertion that crime rates amongst those of West Indian origin are no higher than those of the population at large'. Splendidly expressed! Beautifully expressed! View quote
Enoch Powell