“It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.”

—  Niels Bohr

As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite." by Niels Bohr?
Niels Bohr photo
Niels Bohr 37
Danish physicist 1885–1962

Related quotes

Oscar Wilde photo

“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Source: A Woman of No Importance

Margaret Thatcher photo

“Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician
Hans-Hermann Hoppe photo

“History is ultimately determined by ideas, and ideas can, at least in principle, change almost instantly. But in order for ideas to change it is not sufficient for people to see that something is wrong. At least a significant number must also be intelligent enough to recognize what it is that is wrong. That is, they must understand the basic principles upon which society — human cooperation — rests … And they must have sufficient will power to act according to this insight.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"The Rise and Fall of the City" (23 November 2005) at the Ludwig von Mises Institute http://www.mises.org/story/1959

“We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.”

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) English novelist, poet, critic, teacher

"Phoenix Too Frequent" Critique of D. H. Lawrence
What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970)

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“If our farmers now used the wasteful methods that served for their great grand-fathers they would not merely fail in the present, but would work a grave wrong to the American citizens of the future. In the same way we must apply new political methods to meet the new political needs, or else we shall stiffer, and our children also.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

David Graeber photo

“Honor is the same as credit; it's one's ability to keep ones promises, but also, in the case of a wrong, to "get even."”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 193

Eric Hoffer photo

“A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: First Things, Last Things (1971), Ch. 8 "Thoughts on the Present"

Ken Wilber photo

“An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Forward to Integral Medicine: A Noetic Reader (2003) edited by Marilyn Schlitz & Tina Hyman http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/integral-med-1.cfm
Unsourced variant: I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.
Context: An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.

E. M. S. Namboodiripad photo

“It is the fact of life that a truth emerges out of a conflict between two wrongs. The development of society is through contradictions. Thus the Roopa Bhadrata argument which arose out of our conflict was wrong, in another sense it was correct too. Evaluating the worth of literature we should never confine ourselves to content alone. Mundassery was correct in insisting that form too is to be evaluated. In his own words it is not enough to have perfect content, it must also have perfect form. That is Roopa Bhadrata. Is that not correct? Yes, it is. We accept that we were wrong on that count. Those of us who founded the Jeevat Sahitya Sanghom were political workers. We looked at literature too through political eyes. So we did not pay sufficient attention to the artistic structure of literature. That was our mistake.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

EMS As A Literary Critic And Cultural Activist

Wu Den-yih photo

“There is no timeline for future political negotiations, but both of us (Taiwan and Mainland China) must develop and accumulate enough friendship and mutual trust.”

Wu Den-yih (1948) Taiwanese politician

Wu Den-yih (2012) cited in: " Cross-strait ties are geography, not politics: Wu Den-yih http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20120601000114&cid=1101" in Want China Times, 1 June 2012.

Related topics