“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange
Source: A Clockwork Orange
“I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.”
Translation of Ovid, Metamorphoses, vii. 20 (translated by Tate and Stonestreet, edited by Garth), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue" [veggio ’l meglio, et al peggior m’appiglio], Petrarch, Sonnet ccxxv. canzone xxi. To Laura in Life.
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Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue." by Samuel Garth?
Samuel Garth6
British writer 1661–1719Related quotes
John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States
Letter to (22 August 1774), as published in The Life of John Jay (1833) by William Jay, Vol. 2, p. 345.
1770s, Letter to Lindley Murray (1774)
Context: Among the strange things of this world, nothing seems more strange than that men pursuing happiness should knowingly quit the right and take a wrong road, and frequently do what their judgments neither approve nor prefer. Yet so is the fact; and this fact points strongly to the necessity of our being healed, or restored, or regenerated by a power more energetic than any of those which properly belong to the human mind.
We perceive that a great breach has been made in the moral and physical systems by the introduction of moral and physical evil; how or why, we know not; so, however, it is, and it certainly seems proper that this breach should be closed and order restored. For this purpose only one adequate plan has ever appeared in the world, and that is the Christian dispensation. In this plan I have full faith. Man, in his present state, appears to be a degraded creature; his best gold is mixed with dross, and his best motives are very far from being pure and free from earth and impurity.
Carl Schurz (1829–1906) Union Army general, politician
Remarks in the Senate http://www.bartleby.com/73/1641.html (29 February 1872) He was here responding to the famous slogan derived from a statement of Stephen Decatur: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery
The Chapel of the Hermits, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.”
John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer
Source: Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays
Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
Ibid.
Essays and reviews
“Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.”
Alan Lightman book Einstein's Dreams
Source: Einstein's Dreams
“Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.”
Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter
Program 19
Life Is Worth Living (1951–1957)