Unreliability Quotes

• What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.

  Charlie Munger

  Sloth, Answers, Have Faith

  "Charlie Munger USC Law Commencement Speech- May 2007 3/5". Youtube video, www.youtube.com. January 19, 2010.

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• The only thing we can really count on in this uncertain world is human unreliability itself.

  Garrett Hardin

  World, Uncertain, Humans

  Garrett James Hardin (1985). “Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent”, Penguin Group USA

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• It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished.

  Norman Ralph Augustine

  Aggravation, Cost, Degradation

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• Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation.

  Max Planck

  Taken, Knowledge, Responsibility

  Max Planck (1959). “The new science: 3 complete works: Where is science going? The universe in the light of modern physics; The philosophy of physics”

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• A system tends to grow in complexity instead of simplicity, until the resulting unreliability becomes intolerable.

  Paul Dickson

  Simplicity, Complexity, Grows

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• I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Lying, Moving, Reliability

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God?

  Ann Voskamp

  Stress, Advertising, Surrender

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• The general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in the twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are. Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance. So once again for the lack of objective knowledge, one has to trust to talent or to luck.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  War, Twilight, Fog

  Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, Peter Paret (1989). “On War”, p.140, Princeton University Press

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• When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

  Bryan Stevenson

  People, Legacy, World

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• As we build systems that are more and more complex, we make more and more subtle but very high-impact mistakes. As we use computers for more things and as we build more complex systems, this problem of unreliability and insecurity is actually getting worse, with no real sign of abating anytime soon.

  Matt Blaze

  Real, Mistake, Impact

  Source: www.politico.com

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• What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.

  Tilda Swinton

  Children, Emotional, Ideas

  Source: movieweb.com

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• I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting...not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Danger, Tension, Distribution

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• Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia.

  Larry Sanger

  Wikipedia, Failing

  Jewish Chronicle, October 26, 2006.

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• The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

  Susan Sontag

  Change, Historical, Intellectual

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• To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Dream, Sex, Integrity

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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• I glance back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I've boldly driven straight across without second thought, and I see truth reflecting back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren't I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don't believe? But if I'm grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my beliefs and I trust Him again.

  Ann Voskamp

  Strong, Stress, Believe

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• When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

  Graham Greene

  Hate, Mistake, Believe

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

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