Quotes About Hubris

Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails." Hammond

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate.

These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn't control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds—and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

They were seduced by their own technology.

They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

This conceit went hand in glove with the investment bankers' belief that they could control their destiny, which, as we shall see, they couldn't.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. In

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

When we mistake what we know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature like a machine.

Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land.

Vanity is my favourite sin.

The first and most fundamental issue of sin is pride.

Many a man has gotten himself killed by believing his own press

Conceit is not necessarily a disease. It's more of a weakness.

A man can think he's invincible, but Father Time has a way of putting him in his place.

They had become too conceited to be capable of normal human feelings.

The funny thing about believing you can do no wrong is that you quickly begin doing nothing but wrong.

A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it.