Quotes about reliability
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“Those who had most insistently demanded the innovation of the referendum, because they thought it would produce exactly the opposite result, were temporarily stunned by the sudden revelation that they were populists without the support of the people. Now they have recovered from their concussion and seek to reopen the issue. … Even if they had a coherent alternative policy, which they do not, it would wreck itself upon the rock of inconstancy. … No one any longer expects us to be a rich country. But with an almost touching faith they still hope that we will be consistent and reliable. It is exactly this store of remaining national credit which the false democrats who first demanded and now deny the referendum seek to undermine.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech in Glasgow (1 July 1977), quoted in The Times (2 July 1977), p. 1
1970s

People, Faith, Hope, Support

“The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all… the most likely scenarios…are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean… Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down…”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease...Is it Too Late?, Rolling Stone by Bill McKibbon https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/, (9 April Other Bill McKibben Quotes, 2019) <br class="br">2019

Death, Way, Thinking, Winter

“All people are basically nice. One should deal with every person by believing in his goodness. Anger, jealousy, etc. are the offshoots of his past experiences, which affect his behavior. Primarily every person is nice and everyone is reliable.”

Rajendra Singh (1921–2003) formerly Professor of Physics later Chief of RSS

Mohanrao Bhagwat, First death anniversary of Singh on July 14 - Sangh work first, I come later, The Organiser, 18 July 2004. http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=32&page=3 https://web.archive.org/web/20081006185203/http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content

People, Jealousy, Behavior, Past

“Amin is a splendid man by any standards and is held in great respect and affection by his British colleagues. … He is tough and fearless and in the judgment of everybody … completely reliable. Against this he is not very bright and will probably find difficulty in dealing with the administrative side of command.”

Idi Amin (1925–2003) third president of Uganda

OG Griffith, 1969 despatch on Amin's promotion to major, released by Public Record Office. Amin hailed as splendid, but not very bright, June 23, 2000, Richard Norton Taylor, The Guardian.

“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

World, Way, Game, Understanding

“Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 2 “Four Subjective Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes)” (p. 65)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Making love, Personality

“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

"Still in Melbourne, January 1987", as quoted in [Fred R Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, https://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC, 2006, Yale University Press, 0-300-10798-6, 324]
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)

Pleasure, World, Home, Light

“Metaphysical principles are tempting shortcuts but not reliable guides. There are good reasons why things often seem to happen for reasons—and also reasons why that’s not a bedrock principle.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

Chap. 5 : Reasons Why
The Big Picture (2016)

“When was the last time anybody made a billion of anything safely and reliably? Never. Plants go offline, crap breaks, you can't find a part. There's a ton of things that can go wrong just on manufacturing”

Arthur Caplan (1950) American academic

a billion COVID-19 vaccines <br class="br">Source: Arthur Caplan (2020) cited in " This Is How We’ll Vaccinate the World Against COVID-19 https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/this-is-how-well-vaccinate-the-world-against-covid19" on IEEE Spectrum, 15 December 2020.

Time, Parting

“The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.”

Gavin de Becker book The Gift of Fear

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Motivation, Question

“Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

John Ziman in "Reliable Knowledge: an Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science" (1978)

Books, Knowledge, Perfection, Falseness

“Political friendships are political business transactions and in political, as in economic life, business transactions are most easily and reliably concluded between strong parties The weakling always goes to the wall. A people that lacks a genuine sacrificial spirit or believes that it is not rich enough to keep its armaments in order thereby only betrays that it is played out. I beg you to bear one idea in mind through every difficulty. If anyone should threaten our homestead, we must be ready to the last man.”

Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) German chancellor during World War I

Speech to the Reichstag introducing the Military Bill (April 1913), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany from Defeat to Conquest, 1913–1933 (1945), p. 28

Life, Friendship, People, Idea

“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Way, Future

“The most real and reliable quality of knowledge, is experience.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La più reale ed affidabile qualità di conoscenza, è l'esperienza.
Source: prevale.net

Knowledge

“Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

“While not reliable enough to be put in charge of anything more complicated than a dishwasher, they were very easy to convince that all their troubles were someone else’s fault.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Cryoburn (2010), Chapter 2 (p. 34)

“History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 8, “A Game of Vampires” (p. 244)

History

“With the era of great ideological confrontation behind us, mankind has managed to decrease the threat of self-destruction by nuclear conflagration and to establish sufficiently reliable mechanisms of international security.”

Leonid Kuchma (1938) Second president of Ukraine

Speech at the 50th session of the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts) (1995)

“What reliable information can a traitor who has only completed two years of high-school education provide?”

Aslan Maskhadov (1951–2005) Chechen warlord

In a disparaging reference to pro-Moscow then Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov <br class="br"> "Chechen Leader Gives Exclusive Interview To RFE/RL" https://www.rferl.org/a/1057844.html (7 March 2005)

Education, School