Quotes About Hubris

It may make him overconfident. He may make foolish errors.

Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.

Elie Wiesel used to say that those who believed that all things are permitted were not those who believed that God was dead, but those who thought they were God (a shortcoming common to dictators great and small).

Empires never do feel the touch of mortality. . .You might have individuals who see the writing on the wall, but the imperial power as such doesn't seem able to read the signs, it hangs on for dear life and always ends in a bloody mess.

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.

They think they're better than everyone else." "No," said Jace. "I think I'm better than everyone else. An opinion that has been backed up with ample evidence." Kyle looked at Simon. "Does he always talk like this?" "Yes.

perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all -- that of intllectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders.

You start making big money in the market and you think you know something—you don't know anything! It's the market that knows something, not you!

tends to rivet our attention on the Icarus companies

It seems incredible, in retrospect, that any state could proceed with so much hubris and so little information and planning to the dislocation of so many million lives. It seems, again in retrospect, a wild and irrational scheme which was bound to fail both the expectations of its planners and the material and social needs of its hapless victims.

First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another

Why should we fight them when their own greed and stupidity's destroying them. Eh?

though excessive pride may seek for freedom, it may only see freedom in chains

Never since the time of Copernicus have so many experts been so wrong so often with so little humility.

It's the arrogance of man to think that man can change the climate of the world. Only nature can change the climate. A volcano, for instance.

Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured.

Man was never meant to be a god, but he is forever trying to deify himself.

But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

I reject the idea that humans are superior to other life forms. . . Man is just an ape with an overly developed sense of superiority.

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.