The only way to progress is by stumbling, falling, and getting up, time and again. Error will always be there because the best decisions are always, … - Mario Vargas Llosa

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The only way to progress is by stumbling, falling, and getting up, time and again. Error will always be there because the best decisions are always, to some extent, bound up in error. In the great challenge of separating truth from lies—a goal, perhaps the most human of all goals, that is perfectly possible to achieve—it is essential to bear in mind that in this task there can never be definitive achievements that cannot be challenged later, and no knowledge that cannot be revised. In the great forest of misperceptions and deceptions, mistakes and mirages, through which we roam, the only way that truth can clear a path is by rational and systematic criticism of what is—or passes for—knowledge. Without this privileged expression of freedom, the right to criticize, we are condemned to oppression, brutality, and also obscurantism.

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About Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025) was a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa Vargas Llosa
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There are certain disciplines—linguistics, philosophy, and literary and art criticism, for example—that seem particularly suited to performing the con of converting the pretentious verbiage of certain modish arrivistes into fashionable human science. To confront this type of deception requires not only the courage to swim against the tide but also having a solid cultural background in many areas of knowledge. The genuine humanist tradition […] is the only thing that can stop, or at least temper, the harmful effects on the cultural life of a country of these deformations—lack of science, pseudo-knowledge, artifice that passes itself off as creative thought—that are the unequivocal signs of its decline.

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