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"Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth—that error and truth are simply opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic." Henry Louis Mencken   "Locke himself never explicitly linked his philosophy of knowledge with his philosophy of politics, but the kinship is not hard to see. To begin with, he was one of the greatest of all the fallibilists (or, in that sense, of the skeptics). Just as no-one is absolutely entitled to claim the right to rule, so no one is absolutely entitled to decide what is true. Just as not even a king may infringe on basic rights, so not even the wisest or holiest man may claim to be above error. For any and all of us may be mistaken. 'All men are liable to error,' Locke said. 'Good men are men still liable to mistakes, and are sometimes warmly engaged in errors, which they take for divine truths, shining in their minds with the clearest light.' No: however certain you may feel, however strongly you are convinced, you must check." Jonathan Rauch   "When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, He has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? If a fact be misstated, it is probable he is gratified by a belief of it, and I have no right to deprive him of the gratification. If he wants information, he will ask it, and then I will give it in measured terms; but if he still believes his own story, and shows a desire to dispute the fact with me, I hear him and say nothing. It is his affair, not mine, if he prefers error." Thomas Jefferson   "Whoever thinks that Shakespeare's theater has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. Can the poet have felt otherwise? How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does his ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime! Only from then on does he exercise 'demonic' attraction and excite similar natures to emulation—demonic means here: in defiance against life and advantage for the sake of a drive and idea. Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head: they, and especially Shakespeare, are enamored of the passions as such and not least of their death-welcoming moods—those moods in which the heart adheres to life no more firmly than does a drop of water to a glass." Friedrich Nietzsche   "Human judgment is a frail thing. It may err in being subject to emotion, prejudice or personal interest. It suffers from lack of information, insight, or inadequate thinking. It can seldom rest at the point any single person carries it, but must always remain incomplete and subject to further extension, refinement, rejection or modification. Hence an individual who seeks truth must hear all sides of the question, especially as presented by those who feel strongly and argue militantly for a different view. He must consider all alternatives, test his judgment by exposing it to opposition, make full use of different minds to sift the true from the false. Conversely, suppression of information, discussion, or the clash of opinion prevents one from reaching the most rational judgment, blocks the generation of new ideas, and tends to perpetuate error." Thomas Emerson   "A principle that can't be implemented is just a bad principle. Political thinking must be much more rigorously empirical than Socrates suggests in his discussion with Glaucon. It is not just that we can in practice apply our theories incorrectly, but that practice can show theory to be wrong. The way Socrates talks, if would seem that if things aren't working out in his Republic, this can only mean that there is an error of implementation. He shows no sign of being open to the idea that practical failure might reveal a problem with the theory." Julian Baggini   "It used to be argued that 1914 was a classic instance of a war begun through accident and error: that no statesmen wanted it but all were overborne by events. This view is now untenable. Certainly in late July the frantic telegram traffic became overwhelming, but governments were clear enough about what they were doing. A general conflict was the optimal outcome for none of them, but they preferred it to what seemed worse alternatives. Although Berlin and St Petersburg indeed miscalculated, all sides were willing to risk war rather than back down. The war developed from a Balkan confrontation in which neither Austria-Hungary nor Russia would yield and neither Germany nor France would restrain them. Once conflict spread from eastern to western Europe, Britain too was willing to intervene rather than see Belgium invaded and France beaten. In Vienna, Conrad had long urged war against Serbia, but Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Tisza moved to military action only gradually, believing alternative choices were bankrupt, and only after considering how force would be used. In contrast they were recklessly insouciant about war with Russia, accepting it was likely but assuming that with German aid they could win. The Germans risked war against Russia and Britain with little idea of how to defeat either (and with what their general staff knew was a defective plan against France)." David Stevenson   "Going back to first principles—i.e. to whatever damn-fool principles happen to enter an architect's head without the moderating, error-avoiding influence of architectural tradition—is one of the many things that went wrong with architecture in the twentieth century." Brian Micklethwait   "The most pertinent point about Western individualism, political pluralism, independent law and free press is the self-correcting nature of these things taken together. They add up to a noisy, untidy system, which, in spite or perhaps because of this, has always managed to correct major failings and must be presumed capable of doing so in the future. Authoritarian systems may perform well in the short run, because they can, in the famous phrase used of Mussolini's Italy, 'make the trains run on time,' but over longer periods their centralism leads to unopposed and therefore uncorrected error." Eric Lionel Jones   "Those who hold the monopoly of error reserve to themselves the monopoly of rectification." Jean-François Revel   "What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation. Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering—of trial by error." Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry   "How else is error to be corrected, if not by the informed reason of dissent? Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited." Robert Kennedy   "It will be answered, undoubtedly, that it is the orthodox church which has the right of authority over the erroneous or heretical. This is, in great and specious words, to say just nothing at all. For every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical. Whatsoever any church believes, it believes to be true; and the contrary unto those things, it pronounces to be error." John Locke   "In the East, where the action of Christianity was much more comprehensive, or rather less thwarted, than in the West, there were scarce any rich men left after the middle of the fifth century. Syria, and more especially Egypt, became countries of an entirely ecclesiastical and monastic cast. The church and the monastery—that is to say, the two forms of community—were the sole wealthy bodies. The Arab invaders, when they hurled themselves on these countries, found, after some battles on the frontier, that they had no more to do than drive a flock of sheep. Once their liberty of worship was assured, the Christians of the East were ready to submit to all tyrannies. In the West, the Teutonic invasions and other causes prevented the complete triumph of poverty. But human life was suspended for a thousand years. Industries on a large scale became impossible; by reason of the erroneous ideas current on usury, all banking and insurance business was put under a ban. The Jew alone could manipulate money; he was forced to grow rich, and then he was reproached for the fortune to which he had been condemned. Here was Christianity's greatest error. It did much worse than say to the poor: 'Enrich yourselves at the expense of the rich'; it said: 'Riches are nothing.'" Ernest Renan   "I cannot absolve myself from the guilt of failure to exercise critical responsibility toward my own radical ideals. I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature. To this day, this error and its disastrous consequences are observable in the judgement and behavior of some impassioned individuals, mostly young. Obsessed by the genuine shortcomings of the welfare state at home or abroad, these New Leftists either opt for some variety of communism masquerading as progressive change or fall back on a systematic anti-American foreign policy." Sidney Hook   "We need to demand accountability, which means that we must demand admissions of error from these academic 'experts,' public health agencies, and government officials because the data shows, unequivocally, that the lockdowns failed to stop the spread of infection, they failed to reduce the number of deaths, and that they in fact added death and destruction. If these people don't admit that, society will never trust public health again." Scott Atlas   "Far from establishing an effective equality among the citizens, the Roman Empire, flinging wide the portals of the commonwealth, created a profound distinction between the honestiores (people of good standing and wealth) and the humiliores or tenuiores (the poor). While the political equality of all was proclaimed, inequality was introduced into the law, especially the penal law. Poverty rendered the title of Roman citizen almost illusory, and the great mass of the population was poor. The error of Greece, disdain for the workman and peasant, had not disappeared." Ernest Renan   "Discovery is a trial and error process, what the French molecular biologist François Jacob called bricolage. From the textile machinery of the industrial revolution to the discovery of many pharmaceutical drugs, it was tinkering and evolutionary serendipity we have to thank, not design from first principles." Matt Ridley   "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948." Abdel Rahman Aref   "The alarm about the greenhouse effect seems to come from those who pay attention only to various theoretical models—just as the alarm about global cooling came only from theoretical models in the 1970s (and from some of the same persons who were alarmed then)—whereas those who focus on the historical record seem unconvinced that there have been unusual changes and are quite unworried about the future. With respect to natural resources, the conclusion is inescapable that those who have believed the historical record have been correct, and those who have believed theories without checking them against the record have been in error. Is it not likely that this would be the case with global warming, too?" Julian Simon