Levi Eshkol Quotes

No doubt about it: error is the rule, truth is the accident of error.

Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.

We were almost all wrong

Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

I don't make mistakes. I make prophecies which immediately turn out to be wrong.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them.

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

It is the habit of mankind to mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge.

I have been wrong enough times to know that it is always a possibility.

If you look for a problem long enough, and you can’t find it, the possibility exists that it doesn’t exist.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps. One hopes they won’t be fatal.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

I'm always doubtful. Everything I do is always doubtful. When you're trying to differentiate, there's going to be this gut sense, is this right? If you're not having doubt, then you're not pushing it hard enough, or you're not looking at the details close enough. You need to be feeling that doubt every single day.

Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.