Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 2000.
SAC is responsible for all the ground based intercontinental nuclear missiles and the airborne nuclear bombers. There has been a very low tolerance for error as the dangers were so high. None the less, there have been a number of serious failures over the years but the nuclear and other damage has not been catastrophic.
The original latin: Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
