Quotes & Sayings About Infallibility

Isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist. — Dave Foley

The strange phenomenon of our times
one which will probably astound our descendants
is the doctrine based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator. These three ideas form the sacred symbol of those who proclaim themselves totally democratic. — Frederic Bastiat

A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. — Honore De Balzac

The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together. — Pope Francis

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world. — Ernest Becker

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face. — Robert Anton Wilson

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. — Hannah Arendt

The wise know too well their weakness to assume infallibility; and he who knows most knows best how little he knows. — Thomas Jefferson

One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind, - the omnipotence of the law, - the infallibility of the legislator: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic. — Frederic Bastiat

The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes. — Thomas Huxley

Self-righteousness and presumptive moral judgments pose a great danger in the political arena. To become convinced of the divine infallibility of one's personal predilections on a secular political issue is to play God, to assume to oneself the attributes of deity. It cultivates an arrogant intolerance of dissenting viewpoints and relegates one's political adversaries to the category of evil per se. — Jim Wright

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community. — Marshall McLuhan

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. — Freeman Dyson

Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish. — Charles Fourier

If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. — James G. Frazer

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free. — Sarah Schulman

And so these two convictions stand as marvelous evidences of grace: an awareness of our heart's depravity and an awareness of our Physician's infallibility. "The sum of my complaints amounts but to this - that I am a sick sinner, diseased in every part; but then, if he who is the Infallible Physician has undertaken my case, I shall not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord."64 — Tony Reinke

If God be denied, then His sovereignty and infallibility accrue to other agencies. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. — Thomas Merton

But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time. — Leo Tolstoy

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians. — John Burroughs

In regard to infallibility, I never claimed it; God alone is infallible. His word is true, and in Him is no variableness, or shadow of turning. — Ellen G. White

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death. — Marquis De Sade

Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government's facade of infallibility, and you remove it's people's faith. — Dan Brown

Intelligence does not mean infallibility, nor does it mean immobility. Intelligence means the ability to learn. — Kelly Barnhill

I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something. — Elaine Stritch

The laws of men are not infallible. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

Thus, it does not seem clear (to us) that there is truly a unified research program here, under the name of materialism. The apparent consensus could be something of a mirage, with the only thing holding it together being a denial of the Soul Hypothesis. If so, it begins to look more like a shared assumption than a shared discovery. And of course there can be consensuses based on fashion and the spirit of the age, as well as consensuses based on observation and reason. Even scientists must always be on guard to make sure they are part of the latter rather than the former. The honorable mantle of the scientist conveys no inherent infallibility in this regard. — Mark C. Baker

The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers. — Will Durant

I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that he would support the death penalty only when the infallibility of human judgment had been demonstrated. — Paul Jacob

the Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools - plus the doctrine of papal infallibility - so they traded. Also, — Gloria Steinem

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth. — Louis Kronenberger

Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. — Naomi Weisstein

infallibility, and inerrancy of the Bible, Lindsell took a stand and declared that the Bible remains trustworthy.
It was this same desire to stand against the persistent questioning of the Bible's integrity that brought together more than 250 evangelical leaders in Chicago, Illinois, in October 1978. That summit meeting, convened — R.C. Sproul

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation. — Richard P. Feynman

[For people] to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. — John Stuart Mill

A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope. — Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

The Supreme Court is composed of two groups known as the Infallible Five and the Furious Four. The first group writes those majority decisions on patent law that have brought patent lawyers to their present condition. The second groups writes the dissenting opinions, trying to hold to the law as it was laid down by the first groups the week before. The composition of each group shifts from decision to decision, so that no one justice is right all the time. They sort of pass the infallibility around to keep peace in the family." -- The Improbable Profession — Leonard Lockhard

The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined. — Emma Goldman

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it. — Murray Kempton

Dermot found me; bad news inexorably does. Let me reiterate, bumping into Pope Pius XIII would have surprised me less. In fact, His Infallibility would have blended in better — David Mitchell

Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken.
Infallibility is a sin in any man.
All laws can be broken and are.
Often. — Craig Ferguson

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. — Dan Brown

There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church's infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary manner any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility. — Pope Paul VI

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change — Peter Drucker

Anyone who silences someone else because they believe the other person's opinion is false assumes infallibility. They must be absolutely certain that they are correct on the matter. — Nigel Warburton

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. — Stewart Brand

It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity. — Barack Obama

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone. — John Shelby Spong

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst
those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though ... — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I was no pope - I could not boast infallibility ... — Charlotte Bronte

A Christian anarchist has no business belonging to such a reactionary organization [the Catholic Church]. I do not believe in original sin, indulgences, the infallibility of the pope, or obedience to any church official if it is against my conscience. I am not interested in earning "merit" or in being saved by priestly incantation. — Ammon Hennacy

Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of meeting there no obstacles; but of all these ways, which will lead us most promptly to our goal? Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it. — Henri Poincare

Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final. — George Bernard Shaw

Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline. — George F. Kennan

I'm not religious anymore, but I think it's like papal infallibility, which is a ridiculous man-made tenet, like what I believe most religious tenets to be, are man-made after the fact. — Janeane Garofalo

You are afraid, just as the people of the Vatican were afraid to accept the Copernican theory. Not even they believed in the infallibility of the Ptolemaic theory. They were afraid of the new situation that would prevail if they accepted the Copernican theory. They were afraid of having to reorder their minds to accept it. Strictly speaking, the Catholic Church has still not publicly accepted the Copernican theory. You are like them. You are afraid of having to shed the amor with which you have long defended yourself. — Haruki Murakami

Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found? — Marcus Aurelius

I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics don't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth. — Boris Pasternak

Be a Bible man, go so far as the Bible, but not an inch beyond it. Though Calvin should beckon you, and you esteem him, or Wesley should beckon, and you esteem him, keep to the Scripture, only to the Scripture! from the Sermon: Infallibility - Where To Find It and How To Use It — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility. — John Buchan

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy. — George H. Smith

Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth. — Boris Pasternak

Infallibility: The position that the Bible cannot err or make mistakes, and that it "is completely trustworthy as a guide to salvation and the life of faith and will not fail to accomplish its purpose" (Westminster Dictionary). As the Christian church has traditionally taught, this doctrine is based on the perfection of the divine author, who cannot speak error. — Anonymous

Infallibility and invincible ignorance are the same thing. — Mason Cooley

To us to-day this period of transition, with its mediaeval mixture of commerce, religion, and war, of emotion and logic, of admiration for St. Augustine and belief in the infallibility of Aristotle, looks extremely odd. We forget that our generation may be in danger of similar criticism. Odd or not, this was the state of Italy in the period preceding that great burst of the arts and intellectual life known as the Renaissance. FOOTNOTES: — Henry Dwight Sedgwick

For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. — Christopher Hitchens

Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility. — Robert Anton Wilson

How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake
one person killed that was a civilian
and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that. — Richard Engel

On the whole, sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument. — Benjamin Franklin

I shall ask for the abolition for the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me. — Marquis De Lafayette

Allowances can always be made for your friends to disagree with you. Disagreement, vehement disagreement, is healthy. Debate is impossible without it. Evil does not question itself, only hope questions itself. Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken. Infallibility is a sin in any man. All laws can be broken and are. Often. Like when a bumblebee flies or an ancient regime is toppled. — Craig Ferguson

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. — Jack London

We aren't encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths. — Raquel Cepeda

Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience. — Ayn Rand

For a pediatrician to attack what has become the "bread and butter" of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope. — Robert S. Mendelsohn

If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. — John Stuart Mill

It's difficult admitting you're wrong. Even more difficult admitting it when you have scoffed and otherwise ridiculed the truth with blind, unremitting determination, so blithely confident in your own infallibility. But then one day
or one night
the truth is put into your hands, and you realize those stories and songs and legends told by Northern strangers are truths after all, and that no one has lied to you. — Jennifer Roberson

But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments? — Thomas Jefferson

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith — Yevgeny Zamyatin

All the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears - you don't believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise - you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair - you want to crawl ignominiously home away from these painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it's all about in Christ's name ... — Evadne Price

The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost. — Arthur Koestler

There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God. — John Cornwell

Those who would argue for the infallibility or the inerrancy of scripture logically should also claim the same infallibility for the churches in the fourth and fifth centuries, whose decisions and historical circumstances left us with our present canon. This is apparently what would be required if we were to only acknowledge the twenty-seven NT books that were set forth by the church in that context. Was the church in the Nicene and post-Nicene eras infallible in its decisions or not?
(Formation of Christian Biblical Canon) — Lee M. McDonald

The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation or interpreter of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study. — J.I. Packer

One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me. — William Clay Ford Jr.

As for the men in power,
they are so anxious to establish
the myth of infallibility that they
do their utmost to ignore truth. — Boris Pasternak

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes. — George Orwell

We do not admit the authority of the church with respect to its pretended infallibility, its manufactured miracles, its setting itself up to forgive sins. It was by propagating that belief and supporting it with fire that she kept up her temporal power. — Thomas Paine

It is not the sanctuary that is in danger; it is civilization. It is not infallibility that may go down; it is personal rights. It is not the Eucharist that may pass away; it is freedom of conscience. It is not divine justice that may evaporate; it is the courts of human justice. It is not that God may be driven from His throne; it is that men may lose the meaning of home; For peace on earth will come only to those who give glory to God! It is not the Church that is in danger, it is the world! — Fulton J. Sheen

Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility. — Charles Sanders Peirce

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. — Joseph Glanvill