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Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.

— Matthew Syed Black Box Thinking (2015)

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More quotes by Matthew Syed

It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own.

Black Box Thinking (2015)

Most closed loops exist because people deny failure or try to spin it. With pseudosciences the problem is more structural. They have been designed, wittingly or otherwise, to make failure impossible. That is why, to their adherents, they are so mesmerizing. They are compatible with everything that happens. But that also means they cannot learn from anything.

Black Box Thinking (2015)

You’ll doubtless have noted the increasingly Orwellian terminology applied to parties such as the AfD, Reform and the like. It started with “far” right, then moved to “hard” right, then “radical” right. Soon they will be labelled the “rabid right”.

Angela Merkel was the True Extremist of our Age (2026)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Matthew Syed (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.