Miscalculations Quotes

We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

It's human to make mistakes and some of us are more human than others.

Every candidate for the Presidency should read books that strike cautionary notes about how recent leaders miscalculated or allowed themselves to be led astray by false beliefs.

I've spent my life making blunders.

… in the future, dozens of governments—acquire these weapons [WMDs], it may be only a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed or miscalculation lets loose the terrible force..

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

The margin of safety is always dependent on the price paid. It will be large at one price, small at some higher price, nonexistent at some still higher price.

I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.

Leaders and statesmen are always making mistakes and misjudgments.

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

The Corps of Engineers Analyses are fraught with errors, mistakes and miscalculations, and used invalid assumptions and outdated data.

The average CIA agent was far more comfortable in the refinement of an embassy, a presidential palace, or sitting at the bar in a five-star hotel, than in the marketplace or a peasant hut--a preference that equipped them poorly, to say the least, for the task of gathering real grass-roots information or assessing levels of popular feeling. Time and again, in the Middle East, in Indochina, and in Central America, the CIA agents made disastrous miscalculations that repeatedly left the US utterly unprepared for various violent upheavals. The CIA failed completely to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, and didn't see the collapse of the Soviet Union until it was right on top of them. To put it bluntly, frequently the CIA had too high an opinion of itself to get down with the mass of the people and find out what was really going on.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

Football is a game of errors. The team that makes the fewest errors in a game usually wins.

We need to be skeptical of utopianists who offer unreliable totalistic visions of other worlds and strive to take us there. We need some ideals, but we also need to protect ourselves from the miscalculations and misadventures of visionaries.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. Take the cable thread by thread, take separately all the little determining motives, you break them one after another, and you say: that is all! Wind them and twist them together, they become an enormity.

Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.

We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.