Quotes About Infallibility

#1. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes.

Thomas Huxley

#3. 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

#4. Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline.

George F. Kennan

#5. If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

John Stuart Mill

#6. Dermot found me; bad news inexorably does. Let me reiterate, bumping into Pope Pius XIII would have surprised me less. In fact, His Infallibility would have blended in better

David Mitchell

#7. Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish.

Charles Fourier

#8. I was no pope - I could not boast infallibility ...

Charlotte Bronte

#9. A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

Murray Kempton

#10. One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.

William Clay Ford Jr.

#11. Infallibility and invincible ignorance are the same thing.

Mason Cooley

#12. A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope.

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

#13. Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

Ayn Rand

#14. Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.

Stewart Brand

#15. I'm not religious anymore, but I think it's like papal infallibility, which is a ridiculous man-made tenet, like what I believe most religious tenets to be, are man-made after the fact.

Janeane Garofalo

#16. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#17. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Hannah Arendt

#18. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

Richard P. Feynman

#19. I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something.

Elaine Stritch

#20. If God be denied, then His sovereignty and infallibility accrue to other agencies.

Rousas John Rushdoony

#21. Anyone who silences someone else because they believe the other person's opinion is false assumes infallibility. They must be absolutely certain that they are correct on the matter.

Nigel Warburton

#22. In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.

John Buchan

#23. 'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

Marquis De Sade

#24. Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world.

Naomi Weisstein

#25. I shall ask for the abolition for the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.

Marquis De Lafayette

#26. I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that he would support the death penalty only when the infallibility of human judgment had been demonstrated.

Paul Jacob

#27. The wise know too well their weakness to assume infallibility; and he who knows most knows best how little he knows.

Thomas Jefferson

#28. Be a Bible man, go so far as the Bible, but not an inch beyond it. Though Calvin should beckon you, and you esteem him, or Wesley should beckon, and you esteem him, keep to the Scripture, only to the Scripture! from the Sermon: Infallibility - Where To Find It and How To Use It

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#29. Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?

Marcus Aurelius

#30. Isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist.

Dave Foley

#31. Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken.
Infallibility is a sin in any man.
All laws can be broken and are.
Often.

Craig Ferguson

#32. 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

#33. In regard to infallibility, I never claimed it; God alone is infallible. His word is true, and in Him is no variableness, or shadow of turning.

Ellen G. White

#34. Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government's facade of infallibility, and you remove it's people's faith.

Dan Brown

#35. We do not admit the authority of the church with respect to its pretended infallibility, its manufactured miracles, its setting itself up to forgive sins. It was by propagating that belief and supporting it with fire that she kept up her temporal power.

Thomas Paine

#36. [For people] to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

John Stuart Mill

#37. A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility.

Honore De Balzac

#38. Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

Peter Drucker

#39. On the whole, sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Benjamin Franklin

#40. The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.

Emma Goldman

#41. As for the men in power,
they are so anxious to establish
the myth of infallibility that they
do their utmost to ignore truth.

Boris Pasternak

#42. For a pediatrician to attack what has become the "bread and butter" of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope.

Robert S. Mendelsohn

#43. Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

John Burroughs

#44. There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God.

John Cornwell

#45. The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

George Orwell

#46. But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments?

Thomas Jefferson

#47. Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#48. The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.

Arthur Koestler

#49. Intelligence does not mean infallibility, nor does it mean immobility. Intelligence means the ability to learn.

Kelly Barnhill

#50. We aren't encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.

Raquel Cepeda

#51. The laws of men are not infallible.

Wayne Gerard Trotman