135 Error Quotes

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

Stupidity is always a capital crime.

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Misled by fancy's meteor ray, By passion driven; But yet the light that led astray Was light from heaven.

To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.

Delay is preferable to error.

It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

He ran a gas station down in St. Louis: No, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader of the 20th century.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.'

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of 'popular' writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as 'conjecture and refutation.'

I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.

Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgement are the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers.

Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger.

The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity.

It's human to make mistakes - and some of us are much more human than others.

William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt.' None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.' Diary entry (March 1964), after hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill.

In [his] mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense all because they can't all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they're needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgments, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. We knew everything there was to know before... Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out. Variant: If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell. [p.69]

I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science-and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, While meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.

It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we do know that just ain't so.

To err is natural; to rectify error is glory.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.

For a mans Conscience, and his Judgement is the same thing; and as the Judgement, so also the Conscience may be erroneous.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion. What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us An' ev'n Devotion

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea by some 100 miles.

The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists-and all those who abuse public credulity-is founded on errors in this type of calculation.

[He's] the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.

Do I wanna do right, of course but do I really wanna feel I'm forced to answer you, hell no. I've acquired quite a taste for a well-made mistake, I wanna make a mistake.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the 'scientistic' attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, 'is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.'

Life is only error, And death is knowledge.

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope, that my Country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I'm embarrassed by it. I'm very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn't jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

You know, I have written about this and described it in many different settings, and I did misspeak the other day. This has been a very long campaign.

Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus. I'm aggrieved when sometimes even excellent Homer nods.

[H]umans hate to admit error even as they stand there, black and smoldering, with the stub of a cigarette in one hand, in the middle of a wide crater containing them and the remains of a sign that once read 'DANGER: VOLATILE EXPLOSIVES'

While every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable. (p. 24)

In such dangerous things as war the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst things.

Mistakes that are perceived as mistakes are often not mistakes at all.

You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-)

The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'. :-)

Perfection or freedom from error comes only from grace.

It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency.

Yet throughout history, great victories had come as much because of the losing army's errors as because of the winner's brilliance in battle.

Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.

Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: 'Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.' Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that 'irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.'

Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality). But the prods often include dreams, quirks, and errors-just as we may obtain crucial bursts of energy from foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals of no objective or enduring value. Great truth can emerge from small error. Evolution is thrilling, liberating, and correct. And Macrauchenia is a litoptern.

'The fact is that he [Richard Owen] made a prodigious blunder... and now his only chance is to be silent & let people forget the exposure!' THH to J.D. Hooker 27 April 1861 about Owen's view on human and ape brains; and of course Owen was not silent.[1]

Paul Levesque (Triple H) (Stephanie's Husband)

Aime la verite, mais pardonne a l'erreur.

One of us is obviously mistaken.

Radio has no future. X-ray is a hoax

if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */

How is it possible that stupidity should end our lives when our enemies' cleverest stratagems had not

[as a stoned NASA scientist] Okay, okay check this out. The Mars lander...I did the calculations in feet...but I programmed it in meters! Oops! So instead of landing, fucker buried! 180 million dollar, whoopsie! Two years, SPLAT! Oh, oh, this is great, this is, shh, shh...the Hubble telescope...I forgot to put in the lens! *covers one eye* 'Read the top line for me?' 'Uh, Alpha Centauri, uh...Sirius, the rest is just a black hole!'

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

...the incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary. Every one of which you have records at all, whether it's the CIA, or the Israeli Mossad, or British M-6 or whatever they're called, they're just error after error... Some of them are almost unimaginable. [...] Just take Vietnam. That was the top issue in American international affairs for, you know, 30 years. And we have a record of intelligence, very unusual record of intelligence, because it was not released by the government, it was stolen from them. So it's like capturing enemy archives. That's the Pentagon Papers. That's a 25-year record of high level intelligence, raw intelligence, CIA, DIA, whole bunch, State Department intelligence. A lot of it is in there, and it's very intriguing to look at it. In fact, the most interesting revelation of the Pentagon Papers in my view by far is the intelligence record. Here's roughly what happened, if you're interested I've gone through it in print in detail, but here's the main story. In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of unclear about which side to support. That was true in Indonesia, it was true in Vietnam. You know, do you support the colonial power that's trying to reconquer it, or do you support the indigenous government and then try to take them over, that was their question. [audience laughter] And they made different decisions in different places. In the case of Indochina, for whatever reason, they decided at one point to support France, in it's reconquest of Indochina. Well, at that point, essentially orders went to the U.S. intelligence communities, CIA and others, to demonstrate what was required. What was required to justify the support of France was that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were agents of either the Russians or the Chinese, didn't really matter, one or the other. But they had to be agents of the international communist conspiracy. OK, that would then justify support of the French reconquest. Everyone knew that was untrue, but that was plainly required for doctrinal reasons in order to support France and it's reconquest. OK, then comes a comic opera scene, for about 3 years, in which U.S. intelligence tries to prove what is necessary, that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh are agents of the international communist conspiracy. And they tried, and tried, either China or Russia, they didn't care, anything would do. They couldn't do it, they couldn't find anything. They came back, occasionally they'd say, 'Well we think we found copy of Pravda in the Bangkok legation', or something. But finally the intelligence concluded, look, this is very weird, but that is the only place in South East Asia where a nationalist movement has no connections at all with China or Russia. OK, what was the conclusion? The conclusion in the State Department was, OK, this proves that they're agents of the international communist conspiracy. Ho Chi Minh is such a loyal slave of, pick it, Mao or Stalin, that he doesn't even need orders. [audience laughter] He just does it automatically, so you don't even have to have connections. From that point on, U.S. intelligence never investigated the question of whether the North Vietnamese, the Vietnamese but that's what they were, were following their own national interest. That issue was not discussable. In fact, in this 25-year record, turns out there's one staff paper, which was never even submitted, that raises the possibility that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were concerned with their own national interests instead of acting as agents of the international communist conspiracy. Well you know, anybody with a head screwed on knew that they were following national interests, but U.S. intelligence could not contemplate that possibility because it was doctrinally unacceptable. That's very similar to what was going on in the academic world, I should say. And you can't imagine a more dramatic case, I don't know which to call it, incompetence or whatever, doctrinal control. And this happens all the time. Take, say, the Israeli Mossad, which has a reputation for fantastic insights and so on. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism, that was the goal, it was basically an attack on the PLO. OK, what did they get? Well, they ended up with a fundamentalist islamic movement which drove them out of Lebanon, Hezbollah. Israel's major defeat, they were expelled from most of Lebanon by resistance movement which was basically islamic fundamentalist. OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they got was a islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, drove them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the same thing in the West Bank. They undermined the secular PLO, and they ended up with Hamas on their hands, which they can't control. And they don't understand it, they just keep making the same mistake over and over again. It's just out of ideological fanaticism. And I think you find that wherever you look at intelligence activities.

Brief biography

On Woody Allen:

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

It may be safely assumed as an axiom in the government of states that the greatest wrongs inflicted upon a people are caused by unjust and arbitrary legislation, or by the unrelenting decrees of despotic rulers, and that the timely revocation of injurious and oppressive measures is the greatest good that can be conferred upon a nation. The legislator or ruler who has the wisdom and magnanimity to retrace his steps when convinced of error will sooner or later be rewarded with the respect and gratitude of an intelligent and patriotic people. Our own history, although embracing a period less than a century, affords abundant proof that most, if not all, of our domestic troubles are directly traceable to violations of the organic law and excessive legislation.

It has been a severe lesson for Andy, but I do not think he will do it again.

To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it. Then give up deceiving people; confess ignorance of what you don't know, and leave everyone to form his own articles of faith for himself. Perhaps they won't turn out so bad, especially as they'll rub one another's corners down, and mutually rectify mistakes. The existence of many views will at any rate lay a foundation of tolerance. Those who possess knowledge and capacity may betake themselves to the study of philosophy, or even in their own persons carry the history of philosophy a step further.

Jede menschliche Vollkommenheit ist einem Fehler verwandt, in welchen uberzugehn sie droht.