
“To sing a wrong note is insignificant, but to sing without passion is unforgivable.”
“To sing a wrong note is insignificant, but to sing without passion is unforgivable.”
"Cher Genius", an interview in You magazine, the Mail on Sunday (UK) newspaper (28 November 2010), interviewed by Elaine Lipworth in Las Vegas.
“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, Compiled By Al-Imam Abu Zakariya Yahya bin Sharaf An-Nawawi Ad-Dimashqi, Chapter 279, Hadith 1589 http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/hadeeth/riyad/17/chap279.htm
Sunni Hadith
Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 4, hadith number 663
Sunni Hadith
Source: Essential Ohsawa - From Food to Health, Happiness to Freedom - Understanding the Basics of Macrobiotics (1994), p. 77
Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), pp. 39-41
1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Charles Dickens (1939)
Statement to Chen Gong after falsely killing Lü Boshe and his household. Source: Romance of the Three Kingdoms. An adaptation of the Sanguo Zhi new 2010.
likely intentional misquote by the novel of the quote「宁我负人,毋人负我」above to add character to the story.
Attributed
“An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.”
TED talk (February 2003) http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/health_populati.php
“I don't make mistakes. I make prophecies that immediately turn out to be wrong.”
The Gold Coast Bulletin staff (October 26, 2002) "Muddly Talker", The Gold Coast Bulletin, p. W09.
Interviews
Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)
“The minority is always in the right. The majority is always in the wrong.”
Attributed to Twain, but never sourced. Suspiciously close to "A minority may be right, and the majority is always in the wrong." — Henrik Ibsen "Enemy of the People," as well as a famous quote from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
Misattributed
All Shook Up, written by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley (1957)
Song lyrics
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
July 1, 1960. From the Canadian Bill of Rights.
“I never have the nagging doubt of wondering whether perhaps I am wrong.”
As quoted in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 285
Letter to Willis Everett, July 4, 1946. Parker, Hitler's Warrior, chapter 14, citing Everett Papers in note 5.
“It is wrong not to give a hand to the fallen; this law is universal to the whole human race.”
Iniquum est conlapsis manum non porrigere; commune hoc ius generis humani est.
Book I, Chapter I; slightly modified translation from Norman T. Pratt Seneca's Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) p. 140
Controversiae
“When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.”
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
My Twisted World (2014), Final Days
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
“[T]here is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”
Letter to Humphry House, (11 April 1940). p. 532 http://books.google.com/books?id=0j2qODEJkdoC&pg=PA532#v=onepage&q&f=false, The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: An age like this, 1920–1940, Editors: Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus
Written of her experience with actress Marilyn Monroe in a letter to the American author, Fleur Cowles Meyer, in 1961. As quoted in Fragments, by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (2010)
Source: The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)
"The Vampyre of Time and Memory", ...Like Clockwork (2013)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age
1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)
Context: I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.
“You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;”
"A Dream Within a Dream" (1849).
Context: You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Journal entry (10 December 1801)
Context: Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.
Letter to Larry Callen (14 July 1958), p. 133
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Context: I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. … For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.
Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.
Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
Quoted in " Goodbye Margherita Hack, “The Lady of the Stars.”", iitaly.org (1 July 2013) http://www.iitaly.org/magazine/focus/facts-stories/article/goodbye-margherita-hack-lady-stars?mode=colorbox.
Quoted by Daniel crockett
Source: [Crockett, Daniel, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html/Nature, Connection Will Be the Next Big Human Trend, Huffington Post, Aug 22, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160105052014/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html, January 5, 2016, yes]
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence
Interview by Andrea Di Marcantonio
I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!
Jane to Mr. Rochester (Ch. 23)
Jane Eyre (1847)
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
Source: Crime and Punishment (Zločin a trest)
“I'm tryin' to right my wrongs
But it's funny, them same wrongs helped me write this song.”
Touch the Sky
Lyrics, Late Registration (2005)
“People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.”
Source: White Night
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
Variant: To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.
Part VI: "Two Fragments from a Suppressed Book Called 'Glances at History' or 'Outlines of History' ".
Papers of the Adams Family (1939)
Context: Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object — robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick — a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor — none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
For in a republic, who is "the Country"? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is "the country?" Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn’t.
Kansas City Star (7 May 1918)
1910s
Context: The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
“If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong.”
“It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”
“Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book.”
“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”
“But for this book we could not know right from wrong.”
“Once they have you asking the wrong questions. They don't have to worry about the answers.”
Variant: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Source: Gravity's Rainbow
“This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.”
Response after reading a colleague's paper, quoted in The Successful Toastmaster: A Treasure Chest of Introductions, Epigrams, Humor, and Quotations (1966) by Herbert Victor Prochnow, p. 350, and in Mathematical Apocrypha Redux : More Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical (2005) by Steven George Krantz, p. 194
This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.
As quoted in Comic Sections : The Book of Mathematical Jokes, Humour, Wit, and Wisdom (1993) by Des MacHale
Das is nicht einmal falsch.
It is not even wrong.
As quoted in Not Even Wrong : The Failure Of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law (2006) by Peter Woit (2006), Preface, p. xii
Reported as an inscription quoting Lincoln in an English college in The Baptist Teacher for Sunday-school Workers : Vol. 36 (August 1905), p. 483. The portion beginning with "stand with anybody..." is from the 16 October 1854 Peoria speech..
Posthumous attributions
1850s, Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)
Source: A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered
“Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.”
Usenet
“He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.”
Source: Dirty Havana Trilogy