#certainty

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world. ↗

— Ron Suskind

#explanation #humility #uncertainty #education

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore. ↗

— Joseph Glanvill

#dose #doubts #hath #mathematical #need

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust? ↗

— Garrett Hardin

#ask #bible #cannot #certainty #decay

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#awful #because #cancer #case #certainty

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. ↗

— William Osler

#medicine #probability #science #uncertainty

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#continuity #descartes #existence #existentialism #experience

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. ↗

— Jacob Bronowski

#edge #knowledge #uncertainty #unending

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom. ↗

— George Byron

#certainty #doubting #envy #fool #his

But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty. ↗

— Christian Lous Lange

#certainty #considerations #further #give #hope

Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode. ↗

— Nelson A. Miles

#any #atlantic #back #certainty #driven