“Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”

— Malcolm Forbes

As quoted in Clean Your House & Everything In It (1982) by Eugenia Chapman and Jill C. Major, p. 100

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time." by Malcolm Forbes?

Malcolm Forbes 2

American publisher 1919–1990

Related quotes

“Be a believer / Believe everything / You'll be right half the time”

Blake Schwarzenbach (1967) American singer

"Chinatown"
Orange Rhyming Dictionary (1998)

“Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

“The balance between the sayings: 'Might is Right,' and 'Right is Might.' They're both half-truth, but the first was beating the other out of the field. All the rest of it is cant, you know.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Saint's Progress (1919)
Context: "I cannot explain. There are things that I can't make clear, because you are wilfully blind to all that I believe in. For what do you imagine we are fighting this great war, if it is not to reestablish the belief in love as the guiding principle of life?"
Laird shook his head. "We are fighting to redress a balance, which was in danger of being lost."
"The balance of power?"
"Heavens! — no! The balance of philosophy."
Pierson smiled. "That sounds very clever, George; but again, I don't follow you."
"The balance between the sayings: 'Might is Right,' and 'Right is Might.' They're both half-truth, but the first was beating the other out of the field. All the rest of it is cant, you know. And by the way, sir, your Church is solid for punishment of the evildoer. Where's mercy there? Either its God is not merciful, or else it doesn't believe in its God.

“A fly was very close to being called a "land," cause that's what they do half the time.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

“Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension … he is right … most of the time.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly (March 1953), p. 183

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

The New Yorker (3 July 1943); reprinted as "Democracy" in The Wild Flag (1946)
Context: We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on "The Meaning of Democracy." It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.