13 Quotes About Fallibility

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. Neil Gaiman

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. Meister Eckhart

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Let nothing human be considered sacred. Let nothing human be considered divine. Marty Rubin

No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens. Marty Rubin

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em. Michael Lewis

Foolish defiance was his lifelong response to being ill. Paul C. Nagel

We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up. Ian McDonald

Even as to himself, a man cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. At the same time, beyond these characteristics of his own subject, made up of mere appearances, he must necessarily suppose something else as their basis, namely, his ego, whatever its characteristics in itself may be.. Now man really finds in himself a faculty by which he distinguishes himself from everything else, even from himself as affected by objects, and that is reason. This being pure spontaneity is even elevated above the understanding. For although the latter is a spontaneity and does not, like sense, merely contain intuitions that arise when we are affected by things (and are therefore passive), yet it cannot produce from its activity any other conceptions than those which merely serve to bring the intuitions of sense under rules, and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without this use of the sensibility it could not think at all; whereas, on the contrary, reason shows so pure a spontaneity in the case of what I call "ideas" [Ideal Conceptions] that it thereby far transcends everything that the sensibility can give it, and exhibits its most important function in distinguishing the world of sense from that of understanding, and thereby prescribing the limits of the understanding itself. Immanuel Kant

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go. Jonathan Haidt

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in Tennessee Williams

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings. Harold Bloom