This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as [we] are free to ask what [we] must, free to say what [we] think, free to think what [we] will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
Dogma | Doubt | Error | Freedom | Life | Life | Science | Think |
Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?
Abuse | Better | Error | Humanity | Policy | Practice | Reason | Wisdom | World | Yielding |
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
Discovery | Error | Experience | Failure | Discovery | Failure |
Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.
Deviation | Eccentricity | Mediocrity | Method | Originality |
There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience.
Error | History | Learning | Order | Science | Study | Temptation | Time | Learn | Temptation |
Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors.
Error | History | Intelligence | Mind | Perception | Question | Truth |
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
Now, in a widening sphere of decisions, the costs of error are so exorbitant that we need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance. There are perils that we can be certain of avoiding only at the cost of never knowing with certainty that they were real.
Cost | Error | Knowing | Need | Precision | Prediction | Reputation | Precision | Learn |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
One man does not assert the truth which he knows, because he feels himself bound to the people with whom he is engaged; another, because the truth might deprive him of the profitable position by which he maintains his family; a third, because he desires to attain reputation and authority, and then use them in the service of mankind; a fourth, because he does not wish to destroy old sacred traditions; a fifth, because he has no desire to offend people; a sixth, because the expression of the truth would arouse persecution, and disturb the excellent social activity to which he has devoted himself. One serves as emperor, king, minister, government functionary, or soldier, and assures himself and others that the deviation from truth indispensable to his condition is redeemed by the good he does. Another, who fulfills the duties of a spiritual pastor, does not in the depths of his soul believe all he teaches, but permits the deviation from truth in view of the good he does. A third instructs men by means of literature, and notwithstanding the silence he must observe with regard to the whole truth, in order not to stir up the government and society against himself, has no doubt as to the good he does. A fourth struggles resolutely with the existing order as revolutionist or anarchist, and is quite assured that the aims he pursues are so beneficial that the neglect of the truth, or even of the falsehood, by silence, indispensable to the success of his activity, does not destroy the utility of his work. In order that the conditions of a life contrary to the consciousness of humanity should change and be replaced by one which is in accord with it, the outworn public opinion must be superseded by a new and living one. And in order that the old outworn opinion should yield its place to the new living one, all who are conscious of the new requirements of existence should openly express them. And yet all those who are conscious of these new requirements, one in the name of one thing, and one in the name of another, not only pass them over in silence, but both by word and deed attest their exact opposites.
Aims | Change | Consciousness | Desire | Destroy | Deviation | Doubt | Existence | Good | Government | Humanity | Indispensable | Life | Life | Man | Means | Men | Neglect | Opinion | Order | People | Position | Public | Regard | Reputation | Sacred | Service | Silence | Society | Soul | Success | Truth | Society | Government | Old |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.
Error | Eternal | Fulfillment | Men | Happiness |
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.