“Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.”

— Winston S. Churchill

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Winston S. Churchill 601

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, in Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. (2003), page 234. quoted in Beyond GDP Measuring progress, true wealth, and the well-being of nations http://ec.europa.eu/environment/beyond_gdp/key_quotes_en.html, European Commission:Environment

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Not attributed to Keynes until after his death. The original quote comes from Carveth Read and is:
It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.
Logic, deductive and inductive (1898), p. 351 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18440/18440-h/18440-h.htm#Page_351
Misattributed

“The right kind of leisure is better than the wrong kind of work.”

Baltasar Gracián book The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Más vale el buen ocio que el negocio.
Maxim 247
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

“In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section VII, p. 85

“It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

“What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

As quoted in " Desmond Tutu turns 75 http://www.news24.com/World/News/Desmond-Tutu-turns-75-20061006" at News24 (6 October 2006)

“Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo051109/debtext/51109-03.htm#51109-03_spmin10, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 439, col. 302.
9 November 2005, responding to Charles Kennedy in the House of Commons during Prime Minister's Questions. Blair was referring to the likely defeat in Parliament of additional powers to detain terror suspects without charge, which happened later that day.
2000s

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Crime and Punishment

Source: Crime and Punishment (Zločin a trest)

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

“Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.”

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