We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones.

Andy Rooney was best known for his wry, contrarian observations about everyday habits and self-deceptions, delivered in short essays for television (notably his long-running “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” segments on CBS’s 60 Minutes) and in syndicated columns and essay collections. This line fits that persona: a comic, slightly barbed generalization about how people narrate their own competence. While the remark is widely attributed to Rooney and circulates in quotation anthologies and online databases, I cannot confidently tie it to a specific dated broadcast, column, or book without risking misattribution to a later compilation or paraphrase.

Rooney’s line skewers a familiar bit of self-deception: we can treat small, harmless errors as proof of our humility and fallibility, and then quietly convert that “humility” into a badge of competence. By admitting to minor slipups—misplacing keys, misspelling a word, being late once—we reassure ourselves (and invite others to agree) that our flaws are contained and manageable. The joke is that this pride in “little mistakes” functions as a psychological shield against confronting larger failures or blind spots. It’s a compact critique of ego, selective confession, and the way people curate an image of responsibility by controlling which imperfections they acknowledge.