Lord Acton Quotes

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.

Ability to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false, is the characteristic of intelligence.

Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.

He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.

I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.

Every error is truth abused.

To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.

He that is possessed with a prejudice is possessed with a devil, and one of the worst kinds of devils, for it shuts out the truth, and often leads to ruinous error.

The truth shall set you free. When you hear the truth, it sets you free. So mathematics is truth. It adds up. There's no error. Only time there's an error is when man miscalculates his own problems or his own equations.

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.

Some disguised deceits counterfeit truth so perfectly that not to be taken in by them would be an error of judgment.

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

Error is created; truth is eternal.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance.

Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.

Many-have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.

All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, - never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.

Custom without truth is error grown old.

Mistakes are made on two counts: an argument is either based on error or incorrectly developed.

If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error; if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.