Quotes about wrong
page 23

Neil Peart photo
Isa Genzken photo
William Lloyd Garrison photo

“It is an abuse of language to talk of the slavery of wages… We cannot see that it is wrong to give or receive wages.”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

As quoted in Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction https://books.google.com/books?id=Tpb7HAIhWHgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=9780199843282&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz1ILxqfLcAhVDnuAKHda9Ai0Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=9780199843282&f=false (2012), by Allen C. Guelzo, Chapter One

Bob Seger photo
Richard Nixon photo
Bill Mollison photo
George Harrison photo

“If you're listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they're not
We just wrote it like that”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Only a Northern Song (1967)
Lyrics

Neal A. Maxwell photo
John Adams photo
George Holmes Howison photo
John Dear photo
Simone Weil photo
Jonathan Edwards photo

“They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for any thing, except to meditate on him— that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Written in 1723; from The Works of President Edwards, vol. I, ed. Sereno B. Dwight, 1830.
The young woman described here was Sarah Pierrepont, who became Edwards' wife in 1727.

Neil Cavuto photo

“Part of the problem with service in this country is we don't honor it like we once did. There's nothing wrong or evil about having a bad day. There's everything wrong with making others have to have it... with you.”

Neil Cavuto (1958) American television presenter

"Why do we tolerate awful people?" http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/neilcavuto/2004/05/29/11852.html, townhall.com, (May 29, 2004).

George William Curtis photo

“Up to this time, as I believe, slavery had been let alone, as it claimed to be, in good faith. Up to this time it is clear enough in our history that there was no general perception of the terrible truth that slavery was a system aggressive in its very nature, and necessarily destructive of Constitutional rights and liberties. Up to this time there had been a general blindness to the fact that, under the plea, which was allowed, that it was a local and State institution, slavery had acquired an absolute national supremacy, and if not checked would presently declare itself in national law as the national policy. I think that the eyes of the people were opened rather by the frank statements and legislative action in Congress of the slave party; by the speeches of Mr. Calhoun, filtered through lesser minds and mouths than his; at last by the events in Kansas forcing every man to consider whether, while we had let slavery alone, it had also let us alone; and forcing him to see that its hand was already upon the throat of freedom in this country. I think that by the cuts of the slave party, not by the words of the technical abolitionists, the country was at last aroused. The moral wrong and the political despotism of the system were at last perceived, and a reconstruction of political parties was inevitable. For in human society, while the individual conscience is the steam or motive power, political methods are the engine and the wheels by which progress is effected and secured.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Baba Amte photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Victor Villaseñor photo

“There would be cases where we would not want to accept an hypothesis even though the evidence gives a high d. c. [degree of confirmation] score, because we are fearful of the consequences of a wrong decision.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Theory of Experimental Inference (1948), p. 256; cited in Sharyn Clough (2003) Siblings Under the Skin: Feminism, Social Justice, and Analytic Philosophy. p. 284

Harry Turtledove photo

“What will we do when they start capturing our people?" Klein asked. "They will, you know, if they haven't by now. Things go wrong." Heydrich's fingers drummed some more. He didn't worry about the laborers who'd expanded this redoubt- they'd all gone straight to the camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. "Things go wrong. Ja. If they didn't, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would've worked Churchill to death in a coal mine." He barked laughter. "The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we'd be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But… things went wrong." "Yes, sir." After a moment, Klein ventured, "Uh, sir- you didn't answer my question." "Oh. Prisoners." Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. "I don't know what to do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide pills." "Some won't have the chance to use them. Some won't have the nerve," Klein said. Not many men had the nerve to tell Reinhard Heydrich the unvarnished truth. Heydrich kept Klein around not least because Klein was one of those men. They were useful to have. Hitler would have done better had he seen that. Heydrich recognized the truth when he heard it now; one more thing Hitler'd had trouble with.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 56-57

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 65
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“All heartache is caused by wrong viewpoints.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power

TotalBiscuit photo

“[to a teammate, who just shot at him] "I[t]—Don't shoot me!" [chuckles] "What's wrong with you?"”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Insurgency (standalone) (January 29, 2014)

Ismail ibn Musa Menk photo

“Be wary of people who stab you in the back repeatedly & then behave like they're the ones who have been wronged. It's best to avoid them.”

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

5 April 2016 https://twitter.com/muftimenk/status/717290278785261569
Twitter

Cormac McCarthy photo
Mao Zedong photo

“What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech. But incorrect ideas among the people are quite a different matter. Will it do to ban such ideas and deny them any opportunity for expression? Certainly not. It is not only futile but very harmful to use crude methods in dealing with ideological questions among the people, with questions about man's mental world. You may ban the expression of wrong ideas, but the ideas will still be there. On the other hand, if correct ideas are pampered in hothouses and never exposed to the elements and immunized against disease, they will not win out against erroneous ones. Therefore, it is only by employing the method of discussion, criticism and reasoning that we can really foster correct ideas and overcome wrong ones, and that we can really settle issues.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

" VIII. ON "LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOSSOM LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND" AND "LONG-TERM COEXISTENCE AND MUTUAL SUPERVISION" "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 对于非马克思主义的思想,应该采取什么方针呢?对于明显的反革命分子,破坏社会主义事业的分子,事情好办,剥夺他们的言论自由就行了。对于人民内部的错误思想,情形就不相同。禁止这些思想,不允许这些思想有任何发表的机会,行不行呢?当然不行。对待人民内部的思想问题,对待精神世界的问题,用简单的方法去处理,不但不会收效,而且非常有害。不让发表错误意见,结果错误意见还是存在着。而正确的意见如果是在温室里培养出来的,如果没有见过风雨,没有取得免疫力,遇到错误意见就不能打胜仗。因此,只有采取讨论的方法,批评的方法,说理的方法,才能真正发展正确的意见,克服错误的意见,才能真正解决问题。

Victor Villaseñor photo
Didier Sornette photo

“The problem is not that this optimistic view is wrong. By economic accounting, the optimistic view is mostly right.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 10, 2050: The End Of The Growth Era?, p. 390.

Ralph Vaughan Williams photo
Iain Banks photo
Joseph Heller photo

“Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy.”

God Knows (1984)

Gerry Rafferty photo
Pink (singer) photo

“If someone said three years from now
You'd be long gone,
I'd stand up and punch them up,
Cause they're all wrong.
I know better,
'Cause you said forever,
And ever.
Who knew.”

Pink (singer) (1979) American singer-songwriter

Who Knew, written by Pink, Max Martin and Lukasz Gottwald
Song lyrics, I'm Not Dead (2006)

Richard Feynman photo

“There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

" Cargo Cult Science http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 341

Lewis Pugh photo

“When you are walking up a mountain to attempt something that nobody’s ever tried before, and you pass people bringing corpses down, it becomes very clear that if you get it wrong, the consequences could be fatal.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 234, describing his swim on Mt Everest (2010)
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)

James G. Watt photo
Desmond Tutu photo
Rick Santorum photo

“We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like – the anti-war government nig– uh, the – America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2012-03-30
Rick Santorum: another slip of the tongue but was it the 'N-word'?
Paul
Harris
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/30/rick-santorum-slip-n-word
2012-04-03

Madeleine Stowe photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Vincent Gallo photo
Edvard Munch photo
Garth Nix photo
John Byrne photo
Sarah Monette photo
Pierre Schaeffer photo

“Something new has been added, a new art of sound. Am I wrong in calling it music?”

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist

The Liberation of Sound: An Introduction to Electronic Music (Prentice-Hall edition, 1972)

Jack London photo

“There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

"An Odyssey of the North" in The Best Short Stories of Jack London (1962) ISBN 0-449-30053-6

“Give or take the odd anatomical discrepancy, John Berger affects me exactly like Jane Fonda - ie. any opinion of mine which I discover he shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Woodhouse walkies'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Bassel Khartabil photo

“I don't get what is wrong with eating bad junky food all the time! benefits include dying earlier and saving at least 2 hours a day”

Bassel Khartabil (1981–2015) free culture and democracy activist, Syrian political prisoner

Tweet March 12, 2012, 3:21PM https://twitter.com/basselsafadi/status/177534469815795713 at Twitter.com

Ambrose Bierce photo
John A. McDougall photo
Antonio Sabàto Jr. photo

“There’s nothing wrong with most men’s egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can’t cure.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Aron Ra photo
Viktor Schauberger photo

“[P]op prophets tell us that Muslims in Europe are reproducing so fast and European societies are so weak and listless that, before you know it, the continent will become "Eurabia," with all the topless gals on the Rivera wearing veils. Well, maybe not. The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extent the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong.”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

p. 332 https://books.google.com/books?id=2DvhkRE9GP4C&pg=PA332&lpg=PA332&dq=%22perfected+genocide+and+ethnic+cleansing%22&source=bl&ots=zTru_TC0-I&sig=8Q5OPLD7HV58GnGLALxqqeBnxy4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjt7q3u7MXdAhUkWN8KHZU8B20Q6AEwAnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22perfected%20genocide%20and%20ethnic%20cleansing%22&f=false
2000s, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Aron Ra photo
Will Cuppy photo
Edward Jenks photo
W. H. Auden photo
Dogen photo
Thomas Hobbes photo
Glen Cook photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters

Roger Ebert photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Robert Graves photo

“It doesn't matter what's the cause,
What wrong they say we're righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we're to do the fighting!”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"To Lucasta on Going to the War — For the Fourth Time"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Marvin Minsky photo
Alex Salmond photo

“There is nothing wrong with Scotland that cannot be fixed by what is right with Scotland.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Paraphrase of Bill Clinton's "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America."
Scotland in the World Forum (February 4, 2008), Church of Scotland (May 25, 2009)

Jack Valenti photo

“A huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Comments on the Cable television industry, in testimony to Congress (June 1974); quoted in "What Jack Valenti Did for Hollywood" by Richard Corliss in TIME magazine (27 April 2007) http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1615388,00.html

Erik Naggum photo

“I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world – if it does, it is now or will eventually be wrong – but it can and should speak about the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Philosophy of Lisp programmers http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/70c2703e68baae46 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Darius I of Persia photo
Edward Teller photo
Edouard Manet photo
Maimónides photo
Howard Dean photo
Richard Feynman photo

“I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 193-194

Shiva Ayyadurai photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 124

George Eliot photo

“It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 12 (at page 107)

Nigel Farage photo

“The situation in Greece just goes from bad to worse. We’ve now got a situation where there was the big suicide a few weeks ago, where a 77-year-old man shot himself in the head outside the Greek Parliament. That was the public face of what’s gone wrong.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Segment from an article on the UKIP website, 31 May 2012. On the edge of social breakdown http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2681-on-the-edge-of-social-breakdown
2012

Steven Novella photo

“Even though I think they're probably usually wrong, minority opinions in science are very useful. It keeps the whole process honest …”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #227, November 25th, 2009 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/227
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Linus Torvalds photo

“There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

[Kerstetter, Jim, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_05/b3868110_mz063.htm, Linus Torvalds: SCO Is 'Just Too Wrong', BusinessWeek Online, 2004-02-02, 2006-08-28]
2000s, 2000-04

“If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever.”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Dalemark Quartet, Cart and Cwidder (1975), p. 212.

Hayley Williams photo

“I'm always wrong
But you're never right”

Hayley Williams (1988) American singer-songwriter and musician

Looking Up (2009)
Lyrics

Simone Campbell photo

“The fact is, people work hard and rely on Food Stamps—or SNAP Program—to be able to feed their families. When they work full-time they still live in poverty. That's wrong in our nation. Students who are losing hope because of the difficulty of finding jobs in this tough economy. What we need to do, what is best for America, is to raise wages, create jobs, and then we will move forward. Hard-working people are trying their best, but those who hold on to capital are not sharing the wealth, and there is the problem.”

Simone Campbell (1945) American Roman Catholic Religious Sister and activist

Simone Campbell, interviewed by Al Sharpton, " Nun Responds To Hannity's 'Communist' Comparison: 'Name Calling Is About All That Exists On That Side' http://www.mediamatters.org/video/2014/04/21/nun-responds-to-hannitys-communist-comparison-n/198961," Media Matters for America video, 4:12, April 21, 2014.