confession of error

Gandhi never regretted a confession of error. 'I have always held', he wrote in his autobiography, 'that it is only when one sees one's own mistakes with a convex lens and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just relative estimate of the two.' What politician would say that?

His miscalculation, Gandhi explained, was in overlooking the fact that a person must be trained in civil obediance before civil disobediance against some laws could succeed.

Louis Fischer - The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1982)