Human Error Quotes

“Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.”
― William Landay, Defending Jacob

“The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance....”
― William Landay, Defending Jacob

“What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind?--They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Sometimes a man cannot live up to the best idea he dared to have”
― Javier Merizalde

“[I]t was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail.”
― John Scalzi, The End of All Things

“Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A mistake is an experience, choice or concept it is necessary for us to have or make in order to evolve beyond it. Errors can be the launchpad of great ideas.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In the mirror, if you don't see a man without mistakes, then expect and accept mistakes from others.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I know there's a proverb which says, 'To err is human' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do it if tries.”
― Agatha Christie, Hallowe'en Party

“Anything ever written needs a disclaimer.”
― Michael Whone , Winter Lyric

“I want to do a line of toys called ‘The Better Tomorrow Toys.’ They’re going to be designed so that if a child had an IQ below a certain level, they wouldn’t survive the toy. So you weed out the gene pool at a young age. Stupid kids are not nearly as dangerous as stupid adults, so let’s take them out when they’re young. I know it sounds cruel, but it’s a reasonable expectation.”

He laughs and says, “Of course that’s all a joke. Just like the line of toys I want to do for blind kids, called ‘Out of Sight Toys’ …”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“I would here observe that very much of what is rejected as evidence by a court, is the best of evidence to the intellect. For the court, guiding itself by the general principles of evidence- the recognized and booked principles- is averse from swerving at particular instances. And this steadfast adherence to principle, with rigorous disregard of the conflicting exception, is a sure mode of attaining the maximum of attainable truth, in any long sequence of time. The practice, in mass, is therefore philosophical; but it is not the less certain that it engenders vast individual error ("A theory based on the qualities of an object, will prevent its being unfolded according to its objects; and he who arranges topics in reference to their causes, will cease to value them according to their results. Thus the jurisprudence of every nation will show that, when law becomes a science and a system, it ceases to be justice. The errors into which a blind devotion to principles of classification has led the common law, will be seen by observing how often the legislature has been obliged to come forward to restore the equity its scheme had lost."- Landor.)”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

“In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings or shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“But the point of a ‘human error’ investigation is to understand why people’s assessments and actions made sense at the time, given their context, and without knowledge of outcome, not to point out what they should have done instead.”
― Sidney Dekker, Field Guide to Understanding Human Error

“This is at the heart of the professional pilot’s eternal conflict,” writes Wilkinson in a comment to the November Oscar case. “Into one ear the airlines lecture, “Never break regulations. Never take a chance. Never ignore written procedures. Never compromise safety.” Yet in the other they whisper, “Don’t cost us time. Don’t waste our money. Get your passengers to their destination—don’t find reasons why you can’t.”
― Sidney Dekker, Field Guide to Understanding Human Error

“Valujet flight 592 crashed after takeoff from Miami airport because oxygen generators in its cargo hold caught fire. The generators had been loaded onto the airplane by employees of a maintenance contractor, who were subsequently prosecuted. The editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology “strongly believed the failure of SabreTech employees to put caps on oxygen generators constituted willful negligence that led to the killing of 110 passengers and crew. Prosecutors were right to bring charges. There has to be some fear that not doing one’s job correctly could lead to prosecution.”13 But holding individuals accountable by prosecuting them misses the point. It shortcuts the need to learn fundamental lessons, if it acknowledges that fundamental lessons are there to be learned in the first place. In the SabreTech case, maintenance employees inhabited a world of boss-men and sudden firings, and that did not supply safety caps for expired oxygen generators. The airline may have been as inexperienced and under as much financial pressure as people in the maintenance organization supporting it. It was also a world of language difficulties—not only because many were Spanish speakers in an environment of English engineering language: “Here is what really happened. Nearly 600 people logged work time against the three Valujet airplanes in SabreTech’s Miami hangar; of them 72 workers logged 910 hours across several weeks against the job of replacing the ‘expired’ oxygen generators—those at the end of their approved lives. According to the supplied Valujet work card 0069, the second step of the seven-step process was: ‘If the generator has not been expended install shipping cap on the firing pin.’ This required a gang of hard-pressed mechanics to draw a distinction between canisters that were ‘expired’, meaning the ones they were removing, and canisters that were not ‘expended’, meaning the same ones, loaded and ready to fire, on which they were now expected to put nonexistent caps. Also involved were canisters which were expired and expended, and others which were not expired but were expended. And then, of course, there was the simpler thing—a set of new replacement canisters, which were both unexpended and unexpired.”14 These were conditions that existed long before the Valujet accident, and that exist in many places today. Fear of prosecution stifles the flow of information about such conditions. And information is the prime asset that makes a safety culture work. A flow of information earlier could in fact have told the bad news. It could have revealed these features of people’s tasks and tools; these longstanding vulnerabilities that form the stuff that accidents are made of. It would have shown how ‘human error’ is inextricably connected to how the work is done, with what resources, and under what circumstances and pressures.”
― Sidney Dekker, Field Guide to Understanding Human Error