Fallibility Quotes - Page 2

• Memories are fallible and a timer can save a lot of hard work from going out of the window

  Delia Smith

  Memories, Hard Work, Going Out

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• emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Hate, Past, Reality

  R.A. Salvatore (2008). “The Orc King: Transitions”, p.16, Wizards of the Coast

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• If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Power, Literature, Dependence On Others

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. 3 (1792)

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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.

  Steven Pressfield

  Jobs, Heaven, May

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• ... the fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading.

  George Eliot

  Reading, Brain, Proof

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• Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Artist, Humanity, Vitality

  "Superheroes movies like Avengers Assemble should not be scorned" by Tom Hiddleston, www.theguardian.com. April 19, 2012.

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• 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.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Believe, World, May

  Source: m.motherjones.com

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• As a parent, the only thing I am absolutely certain of is my own fallibility.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Parent, Certain, My Own

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• You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.

  Carl Sagan

  Religious, Agnostic, Wells

  Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

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• Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.

  Kirk J. Schneider

  Couple, Mean, Challenges

  Kirk J. Schneider (1990). “The Paradoxical Self: Toward an Understanding of Our Contradictory Nature”, Prometheus Books

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• Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

  Frank Herbert

  Mistake, Data, Choices

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.320, Penguin

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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.

  Ziauddin Sardar

  Ignorance, Risk, Arrogance

  Ziauddin Sardar (2011). “Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam”, p.103, Oxford University Press

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• The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Doe, Claims, Attributes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.155, Harvard University Press

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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.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Errors, Giving

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.999, Penguin

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• Human fallibility recognised, Gods sovereignty trusted; these are also the only stable foundations for human beings in society.

  Justin Welby

  Foundation, Sovereignty, Humans

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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.

  Sonia

  Appreciation, Motivation, Integrity

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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.

  Umberto Eco

  Believe, Community, Inspired

  Umberto Eco (2013). “Serendipities: Language and Lunacy”, p.19, Columbia University Press

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• Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.

  Colin Powell

  Mistake, Mass Destruction, Community

  Source: www.egonzehnder.com

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• To say that one need art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.

  William Kentridge

  Strong, Art, Evil

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• I believe that God locates himself at the spot where you recognize your own fallibility....And the paradox of it all has been that whenever I give up I seem to do better.

  Rick Moody

  Spiritual, Giving Up, Believe

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• 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.

  Jimmy Carter

  Writing, Mind, Principles

  "President Jimmy Carter Authors New Bible Book, Answers Hard Biblical Questions". Interview with Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 19, 2012.

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• Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.

  D. V. Ager

  Records, May, Fossils

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• I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself.

  Hugh Walpole

  Life, Happiness, Spiritual

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• Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dark

  "Superheroes movies like Avengers Assemble should not be scorned" by Tom Hiddleston, www.theguardian.com. April 19, 2012.

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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.

  Janet Malcolm

  Agreement, Hands, Order

  "The Journalist and the Murderer". Book by Janet Malcolm, 1989.

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