"English! they are barbarians; they don't believe in the great God." I told him, "Excuse me, Sir. We do believe in God, and in Jes...us Christ too." "Um," says he, "and in the Pope?" "No." "And why?" This was a puzzling question in these circumstances.... I thought I would try a method of my own, and very gravely replied, "Because we are too far off." A very new argument against the universal infallibility of the Pope.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why, did you ever know a conceited man dare to praise a picture? The one thing he dreads (next to not being noticed) is to be prov...en fallible! If you once praise a picture, your character for infallibility hangs by a thread. Suppose it's a figure-picture, and you venture to say "draws well." Somebody measures it, and finds one of the proportions an eighth of an inch wrong. You are disposed of as a critic! "Did you say he draws well?" your friends enquire sarcastically, while you hang your head and blush. No. The only safe course, if any one says "draws well," is to shrug your shoulders. "Draws well?" you repeat thoughtfully. "Draws well? Humph!" That's the way to become a great critic!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is of...ten more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experimenters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Looked upon with historical objectivity, the Catholic Church as a religion has far better prospects. Consider its unified, world-w...ide papal leadership, the methods of Catholic ecclesiastic thought, and the life-pervading sanctification of existence, both in everyday life and at great moments; add the present glory of a thousand years of art, the multitude of religious activities, the impressive power of priests and religious, spiritually rooted celibates whose existence the faith consumes; top it off with Catholic piety, based on the Church but far from its violence and political cunning, and even spreading a touch of philosophy among the populace--compared with all this, Protestantism seems poor. Yet Protestantism, whatever may be held against it, has one virtue that outweighs all flaws. It is the principle of its birth: the chance of breaking through every religious phenomenon to a new original realization. In Catholic eyes, Protestantism is purely negative. It gives up tenet after tenet, ending in what must seem to a Catholic the total disappearance of all religious essentials--the God-man, the Resurrection, the personal God, the sacraments--and it pulverizes itself by endless internal schisms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely fo...und in the secular world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »