Quotes About Fallibility

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

And you are almost never right about anything,' he said, pointing at the Humbug. 'and, when you are, it's usually an accident.

It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.

One of the things I'm good at spotting in myself is the fundamental attribution error: that's when you assume that your own dumb mistakes are the result of normal, excusable human fallibility, while other people's mistakes are the result of their fundamental lack of character.

Be careful who you choose as your hero or who you choose to deify, be it Clay Aiken or Barack Obama. You put all you're hope and all your dreams and all your ideas about stuff into one human being. They're a human being they're going to let you down. You can't make someone your hero because of something you read on the internet. The internet is not a source of information it is a source of disinformation.

It is the pinnacle of arrogance to assume that whatever it is that "the experts" believe now is in fact the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Scientists have believed and public health officials have promoted many wrong things over the years, for both honorable, and not so honorable reasons. Sometimes the public health message is dead wrong.

It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Humans were neither all good nor all bad—they were just human and fallible, herself included.

En ciertos casos he dado muestras de total incomprensión respecto de algunas personas, teniendo a muchos por más alegres, más graves o más estúpidos de lo que realmente son; aunque no puedo precisar de qué circunstancia deriva el error. Unas veces nos guiamos en tales materias por lo que ellos mismos dicen, otras por lo que afirman los demás; el hecho es que no nos tomamos el trabajo de observar por nosotros mismos.

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.

a democratic nation can limp along even when its chief of state is widely understood to be a lazy, bumbling simpleton. Fallible leadership is the only kind of leadership any nation ever has. Since totalitarians cannot afford to admit this, their domains start and end in fantasy

You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to.

If you put people up on pedestals, there's only one way for them to go, and that is down.

LORD GORING: (after a long pause) Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.

Quizá me equivoque. Me equivoco con tanta frecuencia...

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.

If there's ever a question about anything, you can always count on me to get it wrong.

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.

A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves "completely certain" about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time. When a group of students made estimates that they believed had only a 1% chance of being wrong, they were actually wrong 27% of the time.

The good we advocate is not to never judge anybody or anything. The good, rather, is to carefully and reasonably judge (weigh, appraise, discern and perhaps appropriately critique) all things in life – but always with an awareness of one's own fallibility, openness to learning and an interest in all moving closer to the truth.

Sometimes I do what I say I'm going to do, but more often I don't. It's a failing. The least of my failings, and the only one I feel up to admitting at the moment.