Quotes about wrong (4315 quotes, page 16)

“Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet -- in the wrong universe.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
1970s, 1980s

Wisdom , Truth , Question , Suffering

“A waste is a nine-year-old boy playing catch with the roof of his garage who already understands that his existence makes for the perfect insult- gay. "You're so gay" a. k. a. stupid a. k. a. dumb a. k. a. wrong. Do you have any idea how gross it feels to hide inside the pile of lies it takes to make you, Sweet Angel, comfortable?”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

A Waste
Poetry

Stupidity , Angels , Feeling , Boy

“I got the rebound and he tackled me. I know this is Sunday, but this is the wrong field.”

Ray Allen

After being tackled by Lamar Odom during a game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics. Lamar Odom Suspended for Flagrant Foul on Ray Allen http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2008/01/01/lamar-odom-suspended-for-flagrant-foul-on-ray-allen/, January 1, 2008.

“The right path to health-care reform is the market path (no subsidies, no monopolies such as drug patents, no licensure, no anything) that tends toward universal distribution at very low prices and relentless improvement in service. The wrong path is to make health care run the same way as the post office. Obama seems to favor the latter path, even though he admits that it is the least well-performing one. This is surely the definition of fanaticism. If the mobs aren't angry, they should be.”

Lew Rockwell (1944) American libertarian author and editor

13 August 2009, "Obama and the Post Office" http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/obama-postoffice126.html
2000s

Health , Way , Universe

“Censors feel they are safe from objectionable material but must protect others who are not as smart or moral. The same impulse tempts the reviewer of 'The Believer'… If the wrong people get the wrong message - well, there has never been any shortage of wrong messages. Or wrong people.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-believer-2002 of The Believer (14 June 2002)
Reviews, Three star reviews

People , Feeling

“The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 490

War , Peace

“The awful events of September 11, 2001 declared a war we were vaguely aware of, but hadn't really comprehended how near the threat was, and how terrible were the plans of our enemies.
It's a big thing, this war.
It's a fight between a just regard for human dignity and a malevolent force that defiles an honorable religion by disputing God's love for every soul on earth. It's a fight between right and wrong, good and evil.
And should our enemies acquire for their arsenal the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons they seek, this war will become a much bigger thing.
So it is, whether we wished it or not, that we have come to the test of our generation, to our rendezvous with destiny.
And much is expected of us.
We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.
Our enemies have made clear the danger they pose to our security and to the very essence of our culture …liberty.
Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.
Like all wars, this one will have its ups and downs.
But we must fight. We must.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2004, Speech at the Republican National Convention (2004)

Love , God , War , Religion

“People get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don’t know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don’t know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at Collider.com (6 February 2011) http://collider.com/jennifer-beals-interview-the-chicago-code/74802/.

People , Behavior , Thinking , Sense

“What’s special about our time is that the ultimate truth has lost its value and is now replaced by relativity: what I believe is true might be wrong from your own perspective”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Truth , Time

“There's no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart; and the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you'll be. The person who strives for security will never be free. The person who believes that she's found security will never reach paradise. What she mistakes for security is purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Gwendolyn? It's the waiting room, it's the lobby. Not only does she have the wrong libretto, she's stuck in the lobby where she can't see the show.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Life , Waiting , Personality

“After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

In a Sunburned Country (US), Down Under (UK) (2000)

Game , Study

“After this first approximation, the various aspects of the situation undergo a more and more detailed analysis. In contrast to this the second method [for analysis of life space] begins with the life space as a whole and defines its fundamental structure. The procedure in this case is not to add disconnected items but to make the original structure more specific and differentiated. This method therefore proceeds by steps from the more general to the particular and thereby avoids the danger of a "wrong simplification" by abstraction.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 4; partly cited in: Chris Argyris (1952) An introduction to field theory and interaction theory.

Life

“As a young man starting my church in Greenville, South Carolina, I overstated several details of my biography because I was worried I wouldn't be taken seriously as a new pastor. This was wrong, I wasn't truthful then and I have to take full responsibility for my actions”

Mark Burns (televangelist) (1979) Christian pastor and founder of the NOW Television Network

Statement released in response to allegations that he had falsified his professional accomplishments http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/03/politics/mark-burns-donald-trump-interview/index.html

Truth

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: "Our country, right or wrong!" They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."”

Carl Schurz (1829–1906) Union Army general, politician

Speech expanding upon his famous statement in the Senate many years before, at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference, Chicago, Illinois (17 October 1899)

People , Peace , Confidence , Falseness

“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth

:lie—
Dust unto dust—
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who

:die
As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must

:dwell—
Too strong to strive—
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng—
The cowed and the meek—
Who see the world’s great anguish and its

:wrong
And dare not speak!”

Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961) American writer, artist and labor activist

Mourn Not The Dead

Men , Lie , World , Strong

“There's so much more to get than wronged.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Light Grenades (2006)

“I have to come to think myself in the last lap of life that one should always look back upon the history of the past, study it and meditate upon it. Thus one learns the main line of advance…it is wrong to be bound by the events and commitments of the last few years, unless these are sound and compatible with the main historic line. I am sure the right course is to know as much as possible about all that has happened in the world, and then to act entirely upon the merits from day to day. Of course, my ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Linlithgow (3 November 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 886
The 1930s

Life , World , History , Thinking

“The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, "My country, right or wrong." In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

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."

Sense , Country

“The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s

War , Thinking , Time , Fight

“We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories […] but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.”

Florence King (1936–2016) American writer

"Déjà Views", in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989), p. 112

Nostalgia , Memory

“His name was Jermyn, and he dodged all day long about the galley drying his handkerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept. He was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling at the end of his nose, who either had been in trouble, or was in trouble, or expected to be in trouble — couldn't be happy unless something went wrong. He mistrusted my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways. I dare say he was right. It seems to me I knew very little then, and I know not much more now; but I cherish a hate for that Jermyn to this day.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

Hate , Youth , Way , Sense

“The investor would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: "Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop."”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 43

Reading

“Again I come back, why is USADA which is really a nefarious locals drugs agency in the United States so intent? Now I can tell you one thing. And I could prove it in SA but I, I went to, I met a chap who worked with Armstrong, err, on Saturday in Boulder Colorado. And he told me that he had a visit, two years ago, err to tell, and the question was, they were agents from a particular agency and, er, they said “will you tell us that Lance Armstrong took EPO? And we could assure that you will never want for money again“. That was his quote on Thursday and he told them in words I can’t put on radio what to do with that and they said “I think we’re talking to the wrong man” and they walked away.”

Phil Liggett (1943) sports journalist, commentator

Accusations that USADA fabricated evidence http://inrng.com/2012/08/can-liggett-save-armstrong/ (30 August 2012)

Money , Quotes , Question , Thinking

“Governments are terrorists, but they hide their actions behind the label of nationalism and patriotism: war becomes defense; theft becomes “taxation”; slavery becomes 'conscription'; terrorism becomes 'defense.' Few people question the violations; rather, if they do protest, it is because the government is oppressing the 'wrong' group of people, and not because they regard coercion itself as wrong.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Facets of Liberty: A Libertarian Primer, (1985), pp. 139-140. (Chapter 17: “Who’s Afraid of No Government?”)

War , People , Question

“But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Albergo Empedocle
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

Forgiveness , Thinking

“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)

“I can not doubt that the continued maintenance of slavery in Cuba is among the strongest inducements to the continuance of this strife. A terrible wrong is the natural cause of a terrible evil. The abolition of slavery and the introduction of other reforms in the administration of government in Cuba could not fail to advance the restoration of peace and order. It is greatly to be hoped that the present liberal Government of Spain will voluntarily adopt this view.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Fourth State of the Union Address (1872)

Peace , Hope , Nature , Evil

“If we should classify one by one all those who hate others and injure others, should we find them to be universal in love or partial? Of course we should say they are partial. Now, since partiality against one another is the cause of the major calamities in the empire, then partiality is wrong.”

Mozi (-470–-391 BC) Chinese political philosopher and religious reformer of the Warring States period

Book 4; Universal Love III
Mozi

Love , Hate , Universe

“I always have the most sympathy for that painting of mine, which the other people appreciate the least. It gives me the impression of an outcast and it takes on a romantic-interesting quality. I therefore always put this work first and want to prove to everyone that he is wrong if he does not appreciate this above all my other works. It is certainly rather foolish, and I do not know, it comes from an 'esprit de contradiction' or just from pity. The bad end has something attractive, one has sympathy for it.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands: De meeste sympathie heb ik altijd voor dat schilderij van mij, wat de andere mensen het minst waardeert / bevalt. Dit geeft mij de indruk van een verstoteling en het neemt een romantisch-interessante hoedanigheid aan. Ik zet dit werk dan ook altijd voorop en wil iedereen bewijzen dat ie ongelijk heeft als hij deze niet boven al mijn andere werken waardeert. Dat is zeker nogal dwaas, en ik weet niet of het voortkomt uit 'esprit de contradiction' of uit medelijden. Het ongeluk heeft iets aantrekkelijks, men heeft er sympathie voor.
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), p. 40 - quote from Bilders' diary, 8 March 1860, written in Amsterdam

People , Painting

“It is the usual though inequitable method of the world, to pronounce an action to be either right or wrong, as it is attended with good or ill success.”
Est omnino iniquum, sed usu receptum, quod honesta consilia vel turpia, prout male aut prospere cedunt, ita vel probantur vel reprehenduntur.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 9, 7.
Letters, Book V

World , Success

“Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

Source: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009)

“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Part of the answer to the question "Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?"
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

People , Way , Mathematics , Idea

“All throughout high school and college everyone told me I couldn’t be an athlete [as a vegetarian], so I wanted to prove them wrong. … Being a vegetarian is great. I have always grown up this way, so it’s not even something I really think about too much. I think a lot of people have to make the decision whether they want to do it or not, but for me it’s been easy; I never even really thought about eating meat, it’s something that always seemed a little gross to me, especially with the way animals are treated and what not. The older I got, the more I started doing a little research, and started realizing all the health benefits as well.”

Jake Shields (1979) American mixed martial artist

"Proving the Haters Wrong: Jake Shields' Life of Resilience and Self-Belief", interview with Sunwarrior.com (27 July 2012) https://sunwarrior.com/healthhub/proving-the-haters-wrong-jake-shields-life-of-resilience-and-self-belief.

People , Health , School , Way

“When President Bush goes on television and says certain cultures hate us for our democracy and freedom, he's just wrong. Everywhere I went in the Middle East, everyone told me how much they loved America and Americans; the hatred is directed at American policy.”

Jim Rogers (1942) American writer

War is Not a Good Idea (2002)

Love , Hate , Democracy , Freedom

“Philosophers might care to ask themselves … how often they are accomplices in increasing the audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even freshmen can refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody can see what's wrong with them. … The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the laws of libel.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Law , Exercises , Idea

“I could have never done it if David [Lynch] wasn’t a friend. He was very protective of me, like a big brother—he always has been. When it comes to Wild at Heart, if we had a love scene, everyone was very respectful… There’s no getting it wrong. Daring to go too extreme or too subtle or too anything—he requires it all of you and it’s all such fun and there’s no judgment on a set with David—ever. Except when I bring bottles of water on a set; he hates that.”

Laura Dern (1967) American actress, director, producer

As quoted in "Laura Dern on David Lynch" by Daniel Nemet-Nejat, Moviemaker, Moviemaker.com (23 January 2007) https://www.moviemaker.com/archives/moviemaking/directing/articles-directing/dern-on-lynch-3393/

Love , Hate , Water , Heart

“We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation — the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Freedom

“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong. It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.” What we will do is we’ll say, “Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.””

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.
In an interview with Kara Swisher as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher (July 18, 2018), Recode.

People , Understanding , Thinking , Reality

“You shut your mouth,
How can you say I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

from the song "How Soon Is Now?"
From songs

Love , Way

“My older friends say, "I was in a punk band once, and we used to be pretty outraged. We would get pretty angry, we'd get a stomp going or something, we would rally against Reagan, or other elected officials. But now I am an older man, and I have some responsibilities, so I really cannot be excited. I appreciate Kurt Cobain, and I'm excited about all those bands that seem very angry, but—why would you keep doing this after all these years?" And I say, "Because I still hate you and I'm trying to prove to you that you're wrong."”

Jack Terricloth (1970)

Because, really, if you're bored and you're listless, you just need to get yourself an enemy.
Introducing "I Wouldn't Want to Live in a World Without Grudges"
Live

Hate

“The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 5, "Sexual Morality"
Mere Christianity (1952)

People , Pleasure , Hell , Sport

“Might and spirit will win and incalculable political and social consequences will follow upon victory. Victory must therefore be ours. England is not played out. Her mission is not accomplished. She can, if she would, take the place of esteemed honour among the democracies of the world, and if peace is to come with healing on her wings the democracies of Europe must be her guardians…History, will, in due time, apportion the praise and the blame, but the young men of the country must, for the moment, settle the immediate issue of victory. Let them do it in the spirit of the brave men who have crowned our country with honour in times that have gone. Whoever may be in the wrong, men so inspired will be in the right. The quarrel was not of the people, but the end of it will be the lives and liberties of the people. Should an opportunity arise to enable me to appeal to the pure love of country - which I know is a precious sentiment in all our hearts, keeping it clear of thought which I believe to be alien to real patriotism - I shall gladly take that opportunity. If need be I shall make it for myself. I wish the serious men of the Trade Union, the Brotherhood and similar movements to face their duty. To such it is enough to say 'England has need of you'; to say it in the right way. They will gather to her aid. They will protect her when the war is over, they will see to it that the policies and conditions that make it will go like the mists of a plague and shadows of a pestilence.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to the Mayor of Leicester, declining to speak at a recruitment meeting (September 1914), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 175
1910s

Love , Men , War , People

“The hon. Gentleman, and other hon. Gentlemen, are pleased to designate me as the arch enemy of the farmers. Sir, I have as good a right as any hon. Gentleman in this House to identify myself with the order of farmers. I am a farmer's son. The hon. Member for Sussex has been speaking to you as the farmer's friend; I am the son of a Sussex farmer; my ancestors were all yeomen of the class who have been suffering under this system; my family suffered under it, and I have, therefore, as good or a better right than any of you to stand up as the farmer's friend, and to represent his wrongs in this House.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1843/feb/17/distress-of-the-country-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (17 February 1843).
1840s

Family , Suffering , Housing

“A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.
The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

"Measure Your Mind", in Love Conquers All (1922)

Imagination , Lying , Appearance , Baby

“It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Five, Advertising And Public Relations Ethics, p. 176

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything — high and low and, most especially, high — lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Introduction
2010s, 2013, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics (2013)

Lie , History , Communication

“Neither are the progressivists, in present-day America, revolutionaries or enemies of the order. Being "radical" or "progressive" they merely want to continue with greater speed and determination along the established, wrong trail.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 281
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

Speed

“I like to think of myself as the ultimate anti-postmodernist post-modernist. Notwithstanding the unusual narrative or visual devices that appear in many of the films, what have kept me going for the three years of investigating [for The Thin Blue Line, was the belief that there answers to questions such as, Adams did it, didn't he? Or Harris did it, didn't he? That it's not just up for grabs. Today, I believe there's a kind of frisson of ambiguity. People think that ambiguity is somehow wonderful in its own right, an excuse for failing to investigate. What can I say? I think this view is wrong. At best, misguided. Maybe even reprehensible.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist http://errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html

People , Question , Thinking , Appearance

“Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.”

Timothy Ferriss book The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

“No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time - but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.”

Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) American secretary of Defence

Charles E. Wilson, quoted in: Louis E. Boone, ‎David L. Kurtz (1987), Management, p. 100

Stupidity , Time , Personality

“What has gone wrong with
the men who are ruling
I'd like to know who
they think they are fooling
They told us that torture
was over and gone
but everyone knows
the same torture goes on”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Singers, act 1, scene 24 (p. 58)
Marat/Sade (1963)

Men , Fools , Thinking

“Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

"Religion and Science: Old Wine in New Bottles" in the Traveller's Library (1933) edited by William Somerset Maugham. p. 1248

Thinking , Falseness

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life , Children , Books , Youth

“I well remember that around 1874, Duret, who is above reproach, Duret himself said to me with all sorts of circumlocutions that I was on the wrong track, that everyone thought so, including my best friends… I admit that when alone, with nobody to prompt me, I reproached myself similarly, - I plumbed myself, - decision was terribly hard. - Should I, yes or no, persevere [or seek] another way? I concluded in the affirmative, I took into account the risks of the unknown, and I was right to stick.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, Paris, 9 May 1883, in a letter to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 30-31
Duret in letters urged Pissarro to abandon the impressionist group and to try to be admitted to the official Salon where his work would be seen by forty thousand people. Duret advises him to make 'paintings which have a subject, something resembling composition, pictures not too freshly painted' (from note 1. John Rewald)
1880's

Way , Decision , Perseverance

“Morgenbesser in response to B. F. Skinner: "Are you telling me it's wrong to anthropomorphize people?" (quoted by Daniel Dennett: The Evolution of Purposes)”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

People , Quotes

“To forget the wrongs you receive, is to remedy them.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 383
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Forgetting

“There were other fellow-sufferers, lower-case ones: the thousands who were either killed, maimed or bereaved by the devotees of the Irish Republic in Mr Sands's organization, the Provisional IRA. Those other dead, however, being the wrong kind, are implicitly excluded from what is seen as a celestial tête-à-tête.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

Passion & Cunning; Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution

Suffering , Dead

“If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, no doubt they may be resisted, even by power. For there is neither greater honor, nor greater obedience, to be given to kings or princes, than God hath commanded to be given unto father and mother. But the father may be stricken with a frenzy, in which he would slay his children. If the children arise, join themselves together, apprehend the father, take the sword from him, bind his hands, and keep him in prison till his frenzy be overpast: think ye, Madam, that the children do any wrong? It is even so, Madam, with princes that would murder the children of God that are subjects unto them. Their blind zeal is nothing but a very mad frenzy, and therefore, to take the sword from them, to bind their hands, and to cast them into prison, till they be brought to a more sober mind, is no disobedience against princes, but just obedience, because it agreeth with the will of God.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

John Knox interview with Queen Mary I, History of the Reformation in Scotland http://www.reformation.org/john-knox-interview.html. (Edited by William Croft Dickinson, D.Lit.). Philosophical Library, New York, 1950

God , Children , Thinking , Madness

“Our nation is far from what it was and what it should be. I have seen so many depressing changes made in my time that I cannot imagine what it must be like for you. There is so much wrong and on so many levels only passing through the crucible of another revolution can get us back the liberties we once had… I do not pretend to know what that revolution will look like or even if it would be successful…”

Eric Frein (1983) American fugitive

Letter to parents (December 2013)

Imagination , Change , Time , Success

“Every piece of information about these statues is totally useless... What. import is it to us if their author was a bureaucrat or a cowherd, an old man or a young person? It is very unfounded to pay attention to these meager ircumstances. There is no difference between an old and young man. Not the least in any domain. Or if he was from Burgundy or Auvergne it's the same. And if he is alive or dead for who knows how long it is the same to us. Between a contemporary and someone from the last century, or a companion of Clovis or the big prehistoric reptiles? No difference whatsoever. We are completely wrong to take interest in these details.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote in Dubuffet's 1947 Entry on an anonymous sculptor, associated with the Swiss collector O.J. Müller; from: Jean Dubuffet, Les Barbus Müller et Autres Pièces de la Statuaire Provinciale(1947), in Prospectus I, pp. 498-49 (transl. Kent Minturn)
remark about the publication of biographically based texts on individual art brut artists; according to Dubuffet: veritable history of art without 'names,' 'dates,' or 'histories'.
1940's

Personality , Dead

“"All living things are afraid to die."
"No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“Yes, I'm complacent now, with my well enough paid job, with a wife I can almost talk to, with a three-year-old son all dark eyes and tousled hair and endearing clumsiness. We go driving on Sunday afternoons, through suburbs just like our own, past houses just like our own, an endlessly recurring, mesmerising daydream under the flawless blue sky. And I whistle an old song of yours, even if I never dare let the words past my lips:There's nothing wrong with The Family
That a flame-thrower can't fix
And there's nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth
That couldn't be cured with a well-aimed BRICK.</blockquote”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Worthless http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm, published in the anthology In Dreams (1992)
Fiction

Family , Past , Housing

“Sometimes I pick up a magazine and read a piece of film criticism — to the end only if I like it. I don't like those which are too free with praise because their reasons seem wrong and that annoys me. Critics who attack me do so for such contradictory reasons that they confuse me, and I am afraid that if I am influenced by one, I will sin according to the standards of the other.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

Reading

“Had I been wrong, this would still have been the honorable thing to do.
I am very glad, however, to find out that I was right.”

David Brin book The Uplift War

Source: The Uplift War (1987), Chapter 110 (p. 626)

“"Let's not get this thing twisted and think we backed into this deal. We didn't lose, we won. Every team that played this weekend played at home and had an opportunity to get into the playoffs just like us. We just happened to win. What's wrong with that? So, let's not get it twisted and say, 'Well, they're lucky.' We didn't get lucky. We won." — Edwards defending the Chiefs' 9–7 record and entry to the playoffs in 2006-07.”

Herm Edwards (1954) American football player, coach and analyst

With Kansas City

Home , Thinking

“Let no one charge us with capricious inconsistency in our actions against Albinus, and let no one think that I am disloyal to this alleged friend or lacking in feeling toward him. 2. We gave this man everything, even a share of the established empire, a thing which a man would hardly do for his own brother. Indeed, I bestowed upon him that which you entrusted to me alone. Surely Albinus has shown little gratitude for the many benefits I have lavished upon him. 3. Now |87 he is collecting an army to take up arms against us, scornful of your valor and indifferent to his pledge of good faith to me, wishing in his insatiable greed to seize at the risk of disaster that which he has already received in part without war and without bloodshed, showing no respect for the gods by whom he has often sworn, and counting as worthless the labors you performed on our joint behalf with such courage and devotion to duty. 4. In what you accomplished, he also had a share, and he would have had an even greater share of the honor you gained for us both if he had only kept his word. For, just as it is unfair to initiate wrong actions, so also it is cowardly to make no defense against unjust treatment. Now when we took the field against Niger, we had reasons for our hostility, not entirely logical, perhaps, but inevitable. We did not hate him because he had seized the empire after it was already ours, but rather each one of us, motivated by an equal desire for glory, sought the empire for himself alone, when it was still in dispute and lay prostrate before all. 5. But Albinus has violated his pledges and broken his oaths, and although he received from me that which a man normally gives only to his son, he has chosen to be hostile rather than friendly and belligerent instead of peaceful. And just as we were generous to him previously and showered fame and honor upon him, so let us now punish him with our arms for his treachery and cowardice. 6. His army, small and island-bred, will not stand against your might. For you, who by your valor and readiness to act on your own behalf have been victorious in many battles and have gained control of the entire East, how can you fail to emerge victorious with the greatest of ease when you have so large a number of allies and when virtually the entire army is here. Whereas they, by contrast, are few in number and lack a brave and competent general to lead them. 7. Who does not know Albinus' effeminate nature? Who does not know that his way |88 of life has prepared him more for the chorus than for the battlefield? Let us therefore go forth against him with confidence, relying on our customary zeal and valor, with the gods as our allies, gods against whom he has acted impiously in breaking his oaths, and let us be mindful of the victories we have won, victories which that man ridicules.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book 3, Chapter 6.

Life , God , Hate , Hostility

“They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Olof Alexandersson: Living Water
Living Water

God , Hope , Fools , Science

“.. of what use is a painting which does not realize its aesthetical problem? Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problems understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old [clssical] painting valuable. And so it becomes to me a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression... The real artists have always been interested in this problem, and you feel it strongly in the work of [Leonardo] Da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Courbet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Cezanne.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

n.p.
1921 - 1930, Art and the Personal Life', Marsden Hartley, 1928

Beauty , Art , Color , Feeling

“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it…. The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier.”

Neal Stephenson book The Big U

Sarah
The Big U (1984)

People , Fear , School , Way

“Once again, my family and I find ourselves being assaulted by the obscenity that is Mumia Abu-Jamal. On Sunday October 5th, my husband's killer will once again air his voice from what masquerades as a prison, and spew his thoughts and ideas at another college commencement. Mumia Abu-Jamal will be heard and honored as a victim and a hero by a pack of adolescent sycophants at Goddard College in Vermont. Despite the fact that 33 years ago, he loaded his gun with special high-velocity ammunition designed to kill in the most devastating fashion, then used that gun to rip my husband's freedom from him--today, Mumia Abu-Jamal will be lauded as a freedom fighter. Undoubtedly the administrators at Goddard who first accepted, then enthusiastically supported Abu-Jamal as their speaker will be moved by his "important message" when, if one distills that message to its basic meaning, it amounts to nothing more than the same worn out hatred for this country and everyone in law enforcement that Mumia Abu-Jamal has harbored his entire life. Many at Goddard College have said that this is a matter of Abu-Jamal's First Amendment right to speak and be heard. What a convenient way to dodge their responsibility to take a moral position on this situation. This is not a matter of First Amendment rights -- it's a matter of right and wrong. Across the country, people have been voicing their disgust with the wrong that the college is about to commit by allowing a convicted cop-killer to speak to them. Is this the message to be heard? How could they allow him to speak when Danny no longer has a voice? It is my opinion that all murderers should forfeit their right to free speech when they take the life of an innocent person. I have repeatedly seen college administrators deny conservative and religious speakers access to their campuses when even the tiniest minority feel their message is in some way offensive. What could be more offensive than having a person who violently took the life of another imparting his "unique perspective" on your students? Let's be honest. The instructors, administrators and graduates at Goddard College embrace having this killer as their commencement speaker not despite the fact that he brutally murdered a cop, but because he brutally murdered a cop. Otherwise, like so many other speakers that have been denied access to college campuses across the country, Goddard's administration would have lived up to their moral responsibility and pulled the plug on this travesty long ago. Shame on Goddard College and all associated with that school for choosing to honor an arrogant remorseless killer as their commencement speaker. Unfortunately, this is something that I am certain they will be proud of for the rest of their lives.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal (1954) Prisoner, Journalist, Broadcaster, Author, Activist

Statement http://6abc.com/news/mumia-abu-jamal-speech-met-with-vigil-for-slain-officer/337357/ by Maureen Faulkner, widow of Daniel Faulkner, upon Abu-Jamal's delivering the Commencement Address at Goddard College in 2014
About

Life , People , School , Family

“ALANZO: Wrongs, like great whirlwinds,
Shake highest battlements. Few for heaven would care,
Should they be ever happy.”

Thomas Dekker The Noble Spanish Soldier

The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622)

Happiness

“I still
Light up like a candle burnin when he calls me up
I still
Melt down like a candle burnin everytime we touch
Oh say what you will
He does me wrong and I should be gone
I still
Be lovin you baby and it's much too much”

Macy Gray (1967) American singer-songwriter and actress

Still" (co-written with Jeremy Ruzumna, Bill Esses, Jeff Blue) - YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CntzOovlkmo
On How Life Is (1999)

Light , Baby

“I'm not a criminal. I did nothing wrong. I was helping my kids. We desperately need medical marijuana in this country..”

Brownie Mary (1922–1999) American medical cannabis activist

Herscher, E. (1992, August 5). "'Brownie Mary' Is Cheered During Testimony at City Hall". San Francisco Chronicle, p. A1.

Help , Marijuana , Country

“Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be as impossible as it would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 9–10
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men , Children , Truth , Age

“The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.
If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17

Life , People , World , Way

“I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/160/mode/1up pp. 160-161

Nature , Appearance , Science

“The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 10, Great Power Politics in the Twenty First Century, p. 361

War , Future

“The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

Personality

“A true leader has to have a genuine open-door policy so that his people are not afraid to approach him for any reason. A man should feel free to tell his chief executive to his face, 'I think you're dead wrong about such and such, and here are my reasons.”

Harold Geneen (1910–1997) American businessman

Managing, Chapter Six (Leadership), p. 113.

People , Feeling , Thinking , Dead

“I don't have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don't think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Free Software as a Social Movement" on Znet (18 December 2005) https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/free-software-as-a-social-movement-by-richard-stallman/
2000s

Truth , Justice , Beauty , Knowledge

“People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats and dogs. Don't get me wrong. Animal Rights Advocates (ARAs) don't want pigs sleeping in our beds or elephants riding in our cars. We don't want to make “pets” of these animals. What we want is something simpler: we just want people to stop doing terrible things to them.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

People , Dogs , Cars , Way

“If we ask what it is he [ George Orwell] stands for, … the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have. … He communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do. Or could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance of being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our own lights—he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

“George Orwell and the politics of truth,” The Opposing Self (1950), pp. 156-158
The Opposing Self (1950)

Life , Men , World , Way

“Often I’ve stated how I hate to be wrong. That has aborted many a tempting error, but not all of them. But I hate much more to stay wrong. Early on, I’ve learned to check back on earlier proclamations. One can learn much from one’s own errors and precious little from one’s triumphs. By September of 1945, it was becoming obvious that oversaving was not going to cause a deep and lasting post-war recession. So then and there, I cut my losses on that bad earlier estimate.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson, 2003

Hate , War , Error , Learning

“The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven, in power and great glory, nor send His messengers panoplied with aught else than the truth of heaven, to communicate to the meek the lowly, the youth of humble origin, the sincere enquirer after the knowledge of God. But He did send His angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith Jun., who afterwards became a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and informed him that he should not join any of the religious sects of the day, for they were all wrong; that they were following the precepts of men instead of the Lord Jesus; that He had a work for him to perform, inasmuch as he should prove faithful before Him.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 2:170-171 (February 18, 1855)
Young comments on Joseph Smith’s visions. This quote is often presented in a heavily edited form which reads: "The Lord did not come…But he did send his angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith Jun.,…"
1850s

Men , God , Truth , Youth

“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) United States Senator

Eulogy for Robert F. Kennedy (8 June 1968)

Life , Death , War , Suffering

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only of principaly [sic] from human relation[ships]. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

In a letter to Russell Fritz (as known as Ron Franz), April 1992

God , Courage , Thinking , Relation ships

“Nobody precisely knew where he born, but it's known it wasn't in São Paulo, nor in Rio de Janeiro, nor in Pará. It was wrong trying to find in this man any kind of regionalism. Before anything, Quaresma was a Brazilian.”

Lima Barreto book Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma

Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915)

“I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Cited in: Roger Martin, ‎Karen Christensen (2013) Rotman on Design. p. 213
New millennium, Harvard Business School Press conference, 2002

Thinking

“Take care lest perchance you fall into the mistake of thinking to gain more by being merciful than by being just; for to pardon him too easily that has transgressed is to wrong him that transgresses not.”

Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) Italian Renaissance author (1478-1529)

Abbiate cura che non v'inganniate, pensando forse meritar piú con l'esser clemente che con l'esser giusta; perché perdonando troppo a chi falla si fa ingiuria a chi non falla.
Bk. 1, ch. 23; p. 32
Souced, Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528)

Thinking

“Me, guilty me, make me your aim,
O Rutules! mine is all the blame;
He did no wrong, nor e'er could do;
That sky, those stars attest 'tis true;
Love for his friend too freely shown,
This was his crime, and this alone.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IX, p. 324

Love , Star

“Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past – the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 483.

World , Past , Future

“My father had a dark glimmer in his eye as he moved behind her. “Old?” He spoke in a low voice as he began to rub her shoulders again. “Woman, I have a mind to prove you wrong.”
She smiled a wry smile. “Sir, I have a mind to let you.””

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 14, “The Name of the Wind” (p. 113)

Smile

“A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Book of Delusions (1936)

Life

“I do not mean to suggest that all those who call themselves monetarists make this unconscious assumption that an inflation involves this uniform rise of prices. But we may distinguish two schools of monetarism. The first would prescribe a monthly or annual increase in the stock of money just sufficient, in their judgment, to keep prices stable. The second school (which the first might dismiss as mere inflationists) wants a continuous increase in the stock of money sufficient to raise prices steadily by a "small" amount—2 or 3 per cent a year. These are the advocates of a "creeping" inflation. … I made a distinction earlier between the monetarists strictly so called and the "creeping inflationists." This distinction applies to the intent of their recommended policies rather than to the result. The intent of the monetarists is not to keep raising the price "level" but simply to keep it from falling, i. e., simply to keep it "stable." But it is impossible to know in advance precisely what uniform rate of money-supply increase would in fact do this. The monetarists are right in assuming that in a prospering economy, if the stock of money were not increased, there would probably be a mild long-run tendency for prices to decline. But they are wrong in assuming that this would necessarily threaten employment or production. For in a free and flexible economy prices would be falling because productivity was increasing, that is, because costs of production were falling. There would be no necessary reduction in real profit margins. The American economy has often been prosperous in the past over periods when prices were declining. Though money wage-rates may not increase in such periods, their purchasing power does increase. So there is no need to keep increasing the stock of money to prevent prices from declining. A fixed arbitrary annual increase in the money stock "to keep prices stable" could easily lead to a "creeping inflation" of prices.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

Where the Monetarists Go Wrong (1976)

Money , School , Past

“DOGS, KIDDIE PORN & STAR TREK: (Hey, that’s a good book title). Unfortunately, I was out with Cosmo when the conversation got interesting around here. First of all, while I think it is wrong to judge dogs by human political categories they most certainly aren’t liberals. Dogs may try to run your life, but they do not much care about running the lives of people they’ve never met. And still, they are willing to judge others -- and admit it. They are morally pragmatic, loyal and willing to share with family while outraged or flummoxed by the idea of taxation for the benefit of people or dogs they don’t know. They firmly believe in sexual harassment as a modus vivendi. They believe nature is a tool. They are not vegetarians and reject animal rights. They chuff at egalitarianism. In short, I think they are Monarchists; they believe in something very close to a Great Chain of Being with humans and dogs at the top (and, even at the top humans and dogs have different ranks).”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

April 2002 http://web.archive.org/web/20001011/www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/2002_04_14_corner-archive.asp
2000s, 2002

Life , People , Books , Family

“I think this [Obama] administration, if its policies were pursued for an extended period of time, would take us into decline, but there's nothing wrong with this country that a real president couldn't cure.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

Thinking , Time , Country

“I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure, that is again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize.”

Joe Barton (1949) United States congressional representative from Texas

[Republicans protecting ‘poor,’ persecuted BP, Ironton Tribune, http://www.irontontribune.com/2010/06/18/republicans-protecting-poor-persecuted-bp/]
[Texas Rep. Joe Barton Apologizes to BP Chief, Kate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune, http://www.texastribune.org/texas-energy/oil-and-natural-gas/texas-rep-joe-barton-apologizes-to-bp-chief/]
in House hearing on Deepwater Horizon oil spill, regarding escrow fund to pay oil spill claims,

Country