Richard Myers Quotes

Not everybody is right all the time.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

We don't claim to be infallible. I don't claim to be giving you truths from on high.

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

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

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

We are none of us infallible not even the youngest of us.

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

No mortal man, moreover is wise at all moments.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

No one is always right.

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

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

No amount of intelligence can save you from stupidity.

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

History shows us that people are terrible about guessing what is going to happen - next week, next month, and especially next year.

The mistake is to imagine that perfection is possible when the very idea is unthinkable.

No man is infallible.

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.

I believe the human mind is a very fallible thing, but it's the only thing that I can really know, I guess.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

Try to remember that decisions are made by individual, fallible personalities, not gods. It's hard. I know.

We're far from perfect. It's a human enterprise.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.