A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry...

A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice....

I’m a fallible human being – but if I were to react to that knowledge with fear/defensiveness then how would I move forward?

The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.

No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the...

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

When you accept fallibility within yourself you become more perfect.

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...

When you demand perfection within yourself, you become more fallible.

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...

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too...

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...

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when...

as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being ‘one of the meanest’ members of the entire Peanuts cast … he is lazy, he is a ‘chow-hound’ without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic,...

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

You make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.

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

If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn’t leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful...