#fallibility

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#against #argument #best #compelling #criminal

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. ↗

— Mark Twain

#fallibility #humor #sin #humor

If gold rusts, what then can iron do? ↗

— Geoffrey Chaucer

#fallibility #flaws #gold #imperfection #inspirational

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty. ↗

— Herman Melville

#human-nature #humanity #infallibility #nature

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. ↗

— Freeman Dyson

#believing #blinded #fall #fallible #human

Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility. ↗

— Tom Hiddleston

#each #fallibility #frailty #humanity #instinctively

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions. ↗

— Gerald Brenan

#keeping #opinions #our #sense #views

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. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#agency #any #connected #dangerous #entrusted

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#evidence #infallibility #change

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry. ↗

— Joseph Glanvill

#being #belief #certain #certainty #humane