Quotes About Fallibility

It sucks the way the world works. You can do a hundred things for people, but you do one bad mistake and everyone crucifies you and that's all they want to remember.

And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that – events beyond the will of the gods – and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.

The world is not perfect and neither am I; I live with a margin of error.

In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.

F]ew people have never hurt anyone or been guilty of any serious lapse [...]

I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature.

Todo totalmente distinto. Porque lo anotado no es exacto. Nada de lo que se anota es exacto. No puede pretender nada. Ni siquiera precisión, aunque todo se consigne según el leal saber y entender, pensando saber algo sobre un asunto totalmente cierto. Siempre será, en el mejor de los casos, menos falso. Pero falso. Distinto. Por consiguiente, no verdadero.

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

Lo malo de quienes se creen en posesión de la verdad es que cuando tienen que demostrarlo no aciertan ni una

Almost every cost estimate made by a physicist is wildly wrong, and the better the physicist the worse it is (Herb York).

in other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.

Io non trovo mai nessuna difficoltà ad ammettere di essermi sbagliato perché sono convinto che l'infallibilità sia un'esclusiva di Dio e degli imbecilli.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Baley's lips twitched. He had guessed that in some ways robotic logic must fall short and he was convinced of it now. As the roboticist had said: Logical but not reasonable.

In ogni secolo gli esseri umani hanno pensato di aver capito definitivamente l'Universo e, in ogni secolo, si è capito che avevano sbagliato. Da ciò segue che l'unica cosa che possiamo dire oggi sulle nostre conoscenze è che sono sbagliate.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

All men are liable to error; and most men are ... by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

The days of kings and lords first began to lose their brightness when philosophers and scientists realized that the ancient Greeks, who had long been held up as the wisest men in the world, were sometimes wrong.

As soon as the groupie finds out that you make errors in everyday life like everybody else does and that you are human, they turn on you and hate you.

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.