To say that one need art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.
Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.
It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
Human fallibility recognised, Gods sovereignty trusted; these are also the only stable foundations for human beings in society.
Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.
Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.
Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations.
Cosmopolitans begin, I think, with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything. That's one of the motivations for conversation across differences. It's in my interest to converse with people who are wrong about different things from the ones I'm wrong about!
The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility.
You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
As a parent, the only thing I am absolutely certain of is my own fallibility.
Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
