Selected error quotes

1. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

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

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

4. The more sure you are, the more wrong you can be.

5. 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.

6. They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

7. 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.

8. There is no original truth, only original error.

9. If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.

10. There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

11. In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

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

13. A loafer always has the correct time.

14. Stupidity is always a capital crime.

15. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

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

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

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

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

20. Delay is preferable to error.

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

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

23. 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.

24. War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

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

30. 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.

31. 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.

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

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

34. 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.

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

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

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

38. 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.'

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

42. Great services are not cancelled by one act or by one single error.

43. You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.

44. A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

45. Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

46. Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

47. Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

48. It is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

49. They set off from Plymouth and landed in Plymouth. How lucky is that? 'This is Plymouth? We've just come from Plymouth! We've gone round in a circle, guys, back on the boat.'

50. Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en avoir.

51. Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?

52. Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.

53. Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

54. What can we know, or what can we discern, When error chokes the windows of the mind, The diverse forms of things, how can we learn, That have been ever from our birthday blind?

55. There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

56. The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

57. It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

58. Why does Camelot lie in ruins? Intellectual error of monumental proportion has been made, and not exclusively by the politicians. Error also lies squarely with the economists. The 'academic scribbler' who must bear substantial responsibility is Lord Keynes...

59. If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

60. What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

61. It is better to don't understand something true, than to understand something false.

62. It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

63. Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

64. The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.

65. I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.

66. If somebody believes that the world is only (...) a few thousand years old, when the true age of the Earth is of the order of a few billion years old, that means they are out by a factor of... a million. Which is not a trivial error.

67. You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

68. The fact is, very few men are right in everything.

69. It is impossible for a man to be respectable enough to make a mistake respectable.

70. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

71. My Master said, on another Occasion, that those who doubt most, always erred least.

72. Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

73. There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.

74. This deficiency in our ideas is not, indeed, perceived in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary. But this proceeds merely from an illusion of the imagination; and the question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions. This question is very difficult, and reduces us to a very dangerous dilemma, whichever way we answer it. For if we assent to every trivial suggestion of the fancy; beside that these suggestions are often contrary to each other; they lead us into such errors, absurdities, and obscurities, that we must at last become asham'd of our credulity. Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compar'd to those angels, whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings. This has already appear'd in so many instances, that we may spare ourselves the trouble of enlarging upon it any farther.

75. The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect; as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name. But as artificers do not work with perfect accuracy, it comes to pass that mechanics is so distinguished from geometry, that what is perfectly accurate is called geometrical; what is less so is called mechanical. But the errors are not in the art, but in the artificers. He that works with less accuracy is an imperfect mechanic: and if any could work with perfect accuracy, he would be the most perfect mechanic of all; for the description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn; for it requires that the learner should first be taught to describe these accurately, before he enters upon geometry; then it shows how by these operations problems may be solved.