Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.”
Young India (27 January 1927)
1920s
“You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.”
Vous savez, c'est la vie qui a raison, l'architecte qui a tort.
Le Corbusier's reply upon learning that the housing project he had designed at Pessac had been altered by its inhabitants, quoted by Philippe Boudon, Lived-In Architecture: Pessac Revisited (1969) [trans. Gerald Onn]
Attributed from posthumous publications
"Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html in The New York Times (9 April 1967)
Context: It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.
“When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.”
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
“Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.”
Program 19
Life Is Worth Living (1951–1957)
"Shoaku makusa : Not Doing Wrong Action" as translated by Anzan Hoshin roshi and Yasuda Joshu Dainen roshi (2007)
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."
