Hubris Quotes

“perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all -- that of intllectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders.”

“It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.”

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”

“Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.”

“Unbridled talent can handicap you with hubris.”

“Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.”

“The Duke would not pay for the works. He says that the Castle can never be taken. That is called hubris, Giacomo, the belief that you are never wrong. Believing you are never wrong is an error that afflicts great men. I have learned that to be right you must first be wrong many times. Without making errors--and learning from them--a man cannot find the truth.”

“But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possess that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?”

“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”