“A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often.”
Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
“What is at first small is often extremely large in the end. And so it happens that whoever deviates only a little from truth in the beginning is led farther and farther afield in the sequel, and to errors which are a thousand times as large.”
Was klein ist im Beginn wird oft am Ende überaus groß sein. Und so geschieht es, das wer im Anfange auch nur um ein Weniges von der Wahrheit abweicht, im Verlauf immer weiter und weiter und zu tausendmal größern Irrthümer fortgeführt wird.
On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862)
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Franz Brentano1
Austrian philosopher 1838–1917Related quotes
Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) French painter
Quote in: Herschel Browning Chipp Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=zvbyDtOaNVgC&pg=PA318, University of California Press, 1968, p. 318 <br class="br">1915 - 1941
Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques
Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Ch. 1 : Setting Out, p. 17
Context: I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service … The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.
William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer
Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811), p. 318
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician
Es ist so gewiß als wunderbar, daß Wahrheit und Irrthum aus Einer Quelle entstehen; deßwegen man oft dem Irrthum nicht schaden darf, weil man zugleich der Wahrheit schadet.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist
Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 4, Positive Feedbacks, p. 82.
Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 21.