Quotes about wrong
page 34

“The kid makes you sick. He looks the part, he walks the part, he is the part. He's six-foot something, fit as a flea, good-looking - he's got to have something wrong with him…. Hopefully he's hung like a hamster! That would make us all feel better!”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

On Cristiano Ronaldo "Holloway column" , BBC SPORTS(4 april 2008) http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/7329117.stm Sourced quotes

Feeling, Parting

“She was a student of history, valued the lessons of it. The worst atrocities began with half-measures, with apologies, compromising with the wrong side, shrinking from what had to be done.”

C. J. Cherryh book Downbelow Station

Book 3, Chapter 2 (p. 192)
Downbelow Station (1981)

History

“If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Three Books”, p. 230
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Law

“We are young, heartache to heartache we stand
No promises, no demands
Love is a battlefield.
We are strong, no one can tell us were wrong
Searchin our hearts for so long, both of us knowing
Love is a battlefield.”

Holly Knight American singer-songwriter and musician

"Love is a Battlefield" (co-written with Mike Chapman)

Love, Strong, Heart

“President Obama keeps insisting that ISIS is not Islamic. Well, maybe they don't practice the Muslim faith the same way he does, but if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea, or drawing a cartoon, or writing a book, or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS. There's so much talk … about wiping out ISIS. You can't, not with bombs. You can only expose that something is a bad idea … Cultures are different. It's okay to judge that rule of law isn't just different than theocracy, it's better. If you don't see that, you're either a religious fanatic or a masochist, but one thing you certainly are not is a liberal. To count yourself as a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. Free speech, separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion or no religion without the threat of violence. Respect for minorities including homosexuals, equality for women.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/09/27/maher_rips_liberals_over_islam_if_were_giving_no_quarter_to_intolerance_shouldnt_we_start_with_honor_killers.html September 26, 2014. Real Time with Bill Maher

Women, Books, World, Faith

“Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.”

Stewart Brand book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 230.

Question, Change, Personality

“I think he's a man of good intentions. I don't doubt it. But I think he's leading us in the wrong direction.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On George W. Bush
Interview with David Brancaccio (2003)

Thinking

“Man is a moral creature. The moral sense is so deeply rooted in human beings that no thief, no murderer has ever asked the abrogation of the penalties against theft and murder. All the laws that have ruled human organization in the past and rule them at present are based on the moral sense: on what is right and wrong. And no religion, no legislature has ever deemed it necessary to define right and wrong, because no one has any doubt as to the meaning of these terms. Only the worshippers of the pseudoscience of modern times regard morality and immorality, justice and injustice, good and evil, as anti-scientific concepts, since it is not possible to reproduce them in a laboratory. … The reasonings of the vivisectionists are unscientific because they don't take into account the intangible realities of life. The moral law is one such intangible reality: And it is the incomprehension of this reality that marks the inescapable failure of experimental science when applied to living beings, with its inevitable sequence of tragic errors.”

Hans Ruesch (1913–2007) Swiss racing driver

Source: Slaughter of the Innocent (1978), pp. 327-328

Life, Religion, Justice, Law

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

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

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

Way

“The war was a “tragic error,” but not “fundamentally wrong or immoral” (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the USA, or an ally or client. Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable. All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, p. 252.

War, People, Error, Idea

“Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you're wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2011

People, Thinking

“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or is too confused to see just why they are wrong. The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Curse of Machinery (ch. 7)

Effort, Time

“I've written every drum bit I ever done, every note. I played the drums. I played the guitar. I played the piano. I wanted it exactly the way I wanted. Exactly. Any composer I would think would want it that way, and I don't deviate at all. Don't you think that somebody like Stravinsky, for instance, don't you think that it would have annoyed him if someone bent a note the wrong way?”

Captain Beefheart (1941–2010) musician

On Trout Mask Replica
The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart (1997)

Way, Thinking

“This is a wrong course the Chinese comrades are trying to lead us on to, it is an opportunist road of vacillation and concessions to the Khrushchev traitor group which finds itself in grave difficulties, and is intriguing in order to escape defeat.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China, 1962-1972, vol. I http://redstarlibrary.org/?p=471 (Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House, 1979) Writings, Reflections on China, 1962-1972

“I want to emphasize that the question of regulating birth rates is highly complex and that any standardized, dogmatic solution "for all time and all peoples" would be wrong.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Hunger and Overpopulation (and the Psychology of Racism)

People, Birth, Question, Time

“Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”
“The Divine—”
“Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.””

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Thinking, Universe

“You try your damnedest, but something always goes wrong. That’s life. If you’re smart, you plan for it.”

Glen Cook book Shadows Linger

Source: Shadows Linger (1984), Chapter 6, “Tally Mix-Up” (p. 232)

Life

“The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever, but what's wrong with that, really?”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Caen, Herb. Herb Caen's San Francisco, 1976-1991, page 159. Chronicle Books, 1992. ISBN
Attributed

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You are totally wrong in saying that in most people’s eyes Hezbollah are terrorists. In most people’s eyes Israel is a terrorist state. It’s the fact that you cannot comprehend that fact that leads to bias that runs through all of your reporting and every question that you’ve asked me in this interview!”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Sky News http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-galloway_060806,00.html, August 6, 2006

People, Question, Freedom

“the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“It appears to me wrong in principle for any Court or Judge to impose fetters on the exercise by themselves or others of powers which are left by law to their discretion in each case as it arises.”

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley (1828–1921) English judge

Saunders v. Saunders (1897), L. R. Prob. D. [1897], p. 95.

Law, Exercises, Appearance

“On all the matters that touch upon the critical moral issues, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the evil side. This is a fact. A mere list of the positions he supports is enough to make this plain: abortion as a "right," cloning of human beings, governmental classification of citizens by race, public benefits for sexual partners outside of marriage, disrespect for property rights against environmental extremism, repudiation of the right to bear arms — no more need be said to show that this candidate is wrong where human decency, human rights and human responsibility bear directly on political issues. Last week, we saw Schwarzenegger does not deny habitual crude offenses against young women. Rather, he theatrically, vaguely and impersonally apologizes for them, before a roaring crowd of adoring fans, admitting neither any connection between action and character, nor any need for genuine penance or reformation. The Republicans who vote for Schwarzenegger will owe Bill Clinton an apology for having given the nation the impression that they sincerely believed character to be an issue for those claiming high office.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

" Arnold's corruption of Republican Party http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/columns/03_10_06wnd.htm", WorldNetDaily, October 6, 2003. Miscellaneous

Women, Marriage, Support, Evil

“I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong.”

Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects

"Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism" at kuro5hin (31 December 2004) http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25.

People, Thinking

“Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

World, Feeling, Light, Night

“The Olympics are an opportunity to redefine the country, but the message is always wrong.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Happiness Can’t Be Faked, 2008

Country

“That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book III, ch. 17 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk3ch17.asp: Of Injuries Proceeding from, or Affecting, the Crown. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

“We are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until "justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting, at Holt Street Baptist Church (5 December 1955) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/mia_mass_meeting_at_holt_street_baptist_church/. "Justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream" is a quotation of Amos 5:24 in the Bible. 1950s

Love, God, Lie, Justice

“The First [Friend] is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything… Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one… How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Secret, Books, World, Hope

“I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.”

Samuel Johnson book The Plays of William Shakespeare

The Plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. I (1765), Preface

Appearance, Reading

“Compromise, hell! That's what happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?”

Jesse Helms (1921–2008) American politician

(1959), as quoted in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/weekinreview/ideas-trends-the-quotations-of-chairman-helms-race-god-aids-and-more.html. 1950s

Hell, Freedom, Time

“Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 68; Paper "The Psychology of Coutroversy", (1929)

Hate, Truth, Hope, History

“When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in BAM Magazine (6 April 1990).

Singing

“Children […] had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in "smart" computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about. Not because there's something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that's where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 6, p. 33–34

Life, Children, Stupidity, Travel

“A good artiste should be able to portray any kind of role. Guide is closest to my heart because Rosie was a very mature character. She is married to Marco and yet decides to go in for a live-in relationship with Raju. Many producers saw it as a negative role, a wrong step at that stage of my career and advised me not to do it, but to me a role was a role. But sometimes personalities do come in the way.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Queen of hearts

Way, Heart, Personality

“Cat, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Cats, Nature

“Brother, brother! we are both in the wrong.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Act II, scene ii
The Beggar's Opera (1728)

“The Republican Party insists that slavery originated in force, by the stronger against the weaker party, and not by natural right; that it is maintained and upheld by oppression and wrong, and against the law of nature. This usurped ownership in man is not that kind of property which is recognized by the general consent of mankind.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Law, Nature

“There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Four, Ethics And Propaganda, p. 166

“Faith plays an important role in an open society. Exactly because our understanding is imperfect, we cannot base our decisions on knowledge alone. We need to rely on beliefs, religious or otherwise, to help us make decisions. But we must remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong so that we can correct our mistakes. Otherwise, we are bound to be wrong.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

Faith, Understanding, Knowledge, Decision

“"My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But" - and his voice changed and the light went out of his face - "what is this condition in which I find myself? This joy of living? This exultation of life? This inspiration, I may well call it? It comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when the stomach is in trim and and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well."”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Seven

Life, God, Light, Change

“The last time I freaked out I just kept looking down.
I st-st-stuttered when you asked me what I'm thinkin' 'bout.
Felt like I couldn't breathe, you asked what's wrong with me.
My best friend Lesley says "Oh, she's just being Miley."”

Miley Cyrus (1992) American actor and singer-songwriter

See You Again, her first hit song
Song lyrics

Time

“Strike a Bedu and he will kill you either then or later. It is easy for strangers to give offence without meaning to do so. I once put my hand on the back of bin Kabina’s neck and he turned on me and asked furiously if I took him for a slave. I had no idea that I had done anything wrong.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 148.

Idea

“The customer is always right. Even when they're wrong.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.177

“Race jokes are kind of like orcas: powerful and entertaining, but you put them on display in the wrong environment and people are going to get hurt, and the joke might die. Like this one just did. (12 April 2016”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

The Daily Show Source: Visibile in Bill de Blasio's Questionable Joke http://www.cc.com/video-clips/g0ng5b/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-bill-de-blasio-s-questionable-joke, CC.com, 12 aprile 2016.

People, Hurt

“I think that some people over here imagine that the Socialists are out to destroy freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of the Press. They are wrong; the Labour Party is in the tradition of freedom-loving movements which have always existed in our country, but freedom has to be striven for in every generation, and those who threaten it are not always the same. Sometimes the battle of freedom has had to be fought against kings, sometimes against religious tyranny, sometimes against the power of the owners of the land, sometimes against the overwhelming strength of the moneyed interests. We in the Labour Party declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers, and with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the United States Congress (13 November 1945), quoted in The Times (14 November 1945), p. 4. Aneurin Bevan said to Attlee afterwards: "That was a noble speech. I felt very proud", quoted in John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 187.
1940s

Love, Money, People, Religion

“Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"Away!" (1962), st. 5,6
General sources

Learning

“Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.”

William Wordsworth book Poems, in Two Volumes

Stanza 7. http://books.google.com/books?id=pzgJAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Thou+dost+preserve+the+stars+from+wrong+And+the+most+ancient+heavens+through+Thee+are+fresh+and+strong%22&pg=PA73#v=onepage Ode to Duty http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww271.html (1805)

Star, Strong

“Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.
Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.”

William Styron book The Confessions of Nat Turner

Part I : Judgment Day
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

Tree, Memory, Night

“Oh, many say that I'm too young
To let you know just where I come from.
Oh, but you will see that it's just a matter of time
My love will surely make you mine.Ooh, living in a world of ghetto life,
Everyone around seems so uptight.
Nothing's wrong.
It's alright with my man, my man.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Something He Can Feel, performed by Aretha Franklin, from Sparkle (1976).
Song lyrics

Love, Life, World, Time

“Until now, I had misunderstood the Satori, enlightenment of Zen Buddhism.
I had thought that satori is to die without fear anytime. But it is a wrong guess.
The satori is to live unconcernedly anytime.”

Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) Japanese poet, author, and literary critic in Meiji period Japan

Jusqu'à maintenant, j'avais mal compris le Satori, ou l'objectif final du bouddhisme zen.
Je pensais que le satori est de mourir sans peur à tout moment. Mais il est fausse supposition.
Le satori est de vivre sereinement en tout temps.
Byōshō-rokushaku

Fear

“Opticks was out of harmony with the ideas of 19th-century physics. …an exposition of the "wrong" (i. e., corpuscular) theory of light,—even though it also contained many of the basic principles of the "correct" (i. e., wave) theory. Not only had Newton erred in his choice… but also he apparently had found no insuperable difficulty in simultaneously embracing features of two opposing theories. …by adopting a combination of the two theories at once, he had violated one of the major canons of 19th-century physics… Today our point of view is influenced by the theory of photons and matter waves, or the… complementarity of Niels Bohr; and we may read with a new interest Newtons ideas on the interaction of light and matter or his explanation of the corpuscular and undulatory aspects of light.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

Idea, Light, Reading

“In 1918 Hitler was in a military hospital blinded from a British poison gas attack. He was just a corporal, he had no family, a limited education, no friends, no connections, no political status, nothing. He decides that he will lead Germany in redressing the grievous wrongs that had been done to it after the First World War and straightening out some of the mistakes that were being made in German society. And fifteen years later he is Chancellor of Germany and he did what he said he was going to do. A wounded war veteran with nobody to help him, and he pulled it up just through his own willpower. That is an amazing story.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

The Fame of a Dead Man's deeds, 2001
2000s, 2001
Source: [Griffin, 2001, 68]

War, World, Education, Family

“Even then he had those piercing cat's eyes of his and when he had said something, finished up by saying: "If I'm wrong, put me right." And so I began to understand that you didn't speak for the sake of speaking, to say that you had done this or that, what you had eaten or drunk, but to work out an idea, to find out what makes the world go round.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XVII, p. 98

World, Cats, Idea, Understanding

“Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right…”

Peter Shaffer Equus

Equus (Longman, [1973] 1993), p. 11 Conferː "Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right." Interviewed by Mike Wood for the William Inge Center for the Arts. http://www.ingecenter.org/interviews/PeterShaffertext.htm

Lie

“There are so many ways of being wrong and so few ways of being right that it is much more economical to study successes.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Way, Study, Success

“Few are the beliefs, still fewer the superstitions of to-day. We pretend to account for everything, till we do not believe enough for that humility so essential to moral discipline. But the dark creed of the fatalist still holds its ground — there is that within us, which dares not deny what, in the still depths of the soul, we feel to have a mysterious predominance. To a certain degree we controul our own actions — we have the choice of right or wrong; but the consequences, the fearful consequences, lie not with us. Let any one look upon the most important epochs of his life; how little have they been of his own making — how one slight thing has led on to another, till the result has been the very reverse of our calculations. Our emotions, how little are they under our own controul! how often has the blanched lip, or the flushed cheek, betrayed what the will was strong to conceal! Of all our sensations, love is the one which has most the stamp of Fate. What a mere chance usually leads to our meeting the person destined to alter the whole current of our life. What a mystery even to ourselves the influence which they exercise over us. Why should we feel so differently towards them, to what we ever felt before? An attachment is an epoch in existence — it leads to casting off old ties, that, till then, had seemed our dearest; it begins new duties; often, in a woman especially, changes the whole character; and yet, whether in its beginning, its continuance or its end, love is as little within our power as the wind that passes, of which no man knows whither it goeth or whence it comes.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.14. The Bride of Lammermuir — LUCY ASHTON.
Literary Remains

Love, Life, Fate, Lie

“It is an irony of the country’s political situation that while untouchability in the social field is considered to be evil, it is sometimes extolled as a virtue in the political field. If a party does not wish to practise untouchability towards its rivals in the political establishment, it is supposed to be doing something wrong. We, in the Jana Sangh, certainly do not agree with the communists’ strategy, tactics and their political culture. But that does not justify an attitude of untouchability towards them. If they are willing to work with us on the basis of issues, or as part of a government committed to an agreed programme, I see nothing wrong in it…. These (SVD) governments are a step towards ending political untouchability. The spirit of accommodation shown by all parties, despite their sharp differences, is a good omen for democracy.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Deendayalji’s speech at the Calicut session of the Jana Sangh, 1967., quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

Democracy, Evil, Parting, Country

“Economics takes a while to learn, even if much of it is in a way quite simple. It is simple to be wrong as well as to be right, and it is none too easy to distinguish between them.”

James Mirrlees (1936–2018) Scottish economist

James Mirrlees in: Anders Barany, ‎Nobelstiftelsen (1996). Les Prix Nobel. p. 353

Way, Learning

“In church I was told that if I so much as smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol, I’d be damned in hell for all eternity[…]it didn’t take long for me to start thinking that sounded all wrong […]I didn’t cotton to the idea that your religion should be flaunted to other people. Your religion is for you, and is best kept close to your heart.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

[The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart, 11, Nelson, Willie; Pipkin, Turk, 159240197X, 2006, Gotham]

People, Alcohol, Religion, Idea

“In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, Truth, Faith, Error

“Police, federal agency and military operations are fraught with the potential for catastrophic disaster. The nature of operations routinely conducted by counter narcotic agents, special weapons and tactics units, special response teams, and mlitary special operations units leave no room for error. A drug bust in the wrong house or a botched hostage rescue situation will be on the evening news with some senior official hemming and hawing and wishing he'd planned better. Once that occurs there is no defense. The best that can happen is to convince everyone that it will not occur again because of all the "lessons learned, and hope that there is a crisis somewhere else that will take your place in the media's attention. THIS IS A LOSING STRATEGY.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 12

Hope, Error, Nature, Learning

“It is certainly a good thing always to forgive with generosity, but it is no doubt just never to forget the wrongs received: they belong to the route that leads to inner maturity.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Forgiveness, Forgetting

“Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life, People, Books, Way

“There is a narrowness of action, though not of intent, which characterizes university departments, and scientific publications and scientists in general: if it is too popular, it is somehow vulgar and wrong. You can't really speak to those people across the street. I live next to the chemists at MIT, but I never see them. I hardly know who they are, yet between physics and chemistry it is hard to know who should study what molecule. I myself am guilty. We form communities not based on the problems of science, but on quite other things. This is part of the general split between the intelligent member of the public and the scientist who speaks in narrow focus. But the great theoretical problems which I believe the world expects will somehow be solved by science, problems close to deep philosophical issues are the very problems that find the least expertise, the least degree of organization, the least institutional support in the scientific institutions of America or indeed of the world.”

Philip Morrison (1915–2005) American astrophysicist

On specialization, Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True (1995)

People, World, Intelligence, Communication

“A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 8, "Hawks"

“O Sarmad! Thou hast won a great name in the world,
Since thou hast turned away from infidelity to Islam.
What wrong was there in God and His Prophet
That you hast become a disciple of Lacchman and Rama?”

Sarmad Kashani (1590–1661) Persian mystic, poet and saint

Source: [Asiri 1950, No. 334] Asiri 1950 — Asiri, Fazl Mahmud. Rubaiyat-i-Sarmad. Shantiniketan, 1950. Quoted from SARMAD: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SUFI https://iphras.ru/uplfile/smirnov/ishraq/3/24_prig.pdf by N. Prigarina

God, World

“Sometimes "pi = 3.14" is (a) infinitely faster than the "correct" answer and (b) the difference between the "correct" and the "wrong" answer is meaningless. And this is why I get upset when somebody dismisses performance issues based on "correctness". The thing is, some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it doesn't matter. While performance almost always matters. And I absolutely detest the fact that people so often dismiss performance concerns so readily.”

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

Git mailing list, Fri, 8 Aug 2008
2000s, 2008

People

“The President's proclamation is a mighty blow against the legal positivism that infects our legal establishment, and the moral relativism that pervades our society. But this can only be the beginning of a far greater struggle than that against the physical danger of terrorism. It means taking up once again the burden Lincoln bore, in reasserting the truth of the Declaration, against the "positive good" theory of slavery, and against the still more deadly theory that majorities, and not the difference between right and wrong, should decide the future of slavery.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

Truth, Future

“If anyone believes that the enforcement of laws will be stopped if I am done away with, that they are more than wrong, because I am not the system. The system will keep on functioning and no one will get amnesty by getting one or two state officials out of the way.”

Zoran Đinđić (1952–2003) Serbian politician

Politika, 20.02.2003.

Law, Way

“I can see no hope at present of such a vaccine being produced… I have adopted a frankly defeatist attitude towards the problem of poliomyelitis and I hope that future developments will prove me wrong… No means of controlling poliomyelitis is at present visible.”

Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985) Australian virologist

Burnet, F.M. (1949) "Some aspects of the epidemiology of poliomyelitis". in: Proc. Royal Australasian College of Physicians. 4: 95-100.
Quote from 1949 on the development of a poliomyelitis vaccine, which was developed later that year.

Hope, Problem, Future

“There is nothing wrong with crushing white supremacy. It is wrong to think you’re superior to others on the basis of the colour of your skin … and what perpetuates that is the economic exclusion of our people. … If we can’t find the necessary skill‚ let’s go and fetch the old man. ‘Old man‚ you are coming to mentor this young one to produce the best product’ to build a better SA.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

At Midrand on 3 June 2016, My hatred of white supremacy isn’t a hatred of whites‚ says Malema http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/2016/06/10/my-hatred-of-white-supremacy-isnt-a-hatred-of-whites-says-malema, in BusinessDay (10 June 2016)

People, Thinking

“Is this the visitor from the wrong side
of the mirror? Or the shape
that suddenly flitted past my window?
Is it the new moon playing tricks,
or is someone really standing there again
between the stove and the cupboard?”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Past

“It would seem that Maunder and Sporer were right and that most of the rest of us have been wrong. As is often the case in the onrush of modern science, we had too quickly forgotten the past, forgotten the less-than-perfect pedigree of the sunspot cycle and the fact that it too once came as a surprise. We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism, contending that the modern behavior of the sun represented the normal behavior of the sun over a much longer span of time.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Source: "The Case of the Missing Sunspots"; Scientific American, May 1977, volume 236, issue 5, pages 80-92

Behavior, Science, Time, Sun

“It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Letter to Louis D. Brandeis, dated (22 January 1919).
Extra-judicial writings

“The tragic youth was going down on me
(…)
I've been right and I've been wrong
Now I'm back where I started from
Never looked over reality's shoulder”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

"Reality"
Song lyrics, Reality (2003)

Youth, Reality

“The work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be, it was how you got a productive economy.
But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of story. If their employees came home with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing.
The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story…had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure?”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Erasmas theorizing why others are joining his journey, Part 7, "Feral"
Anathem (2008)

Money, People, Religion, Feeling

“Marx was wrong--religion is not the opiate of the masses, baseball is.”

Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) Atheist activist

Quoted without citation by Nathaniel J. Ehrlich, Psychology and contemporary affairs, p. 78 (1972)
Attributed

Religion

“…the information revolution. Almost everybody is sure …that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and …that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors …The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s…did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829 …Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, …it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes. …the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions. …These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

"The way ahead" Economist.com http://www.economist.com/ (November 2001) 1990s and later

Lie, Change, Speed

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 162)

Truth, Religion, Way, Idea

“Fears to look bad in front of other people, to say something wrong, to be laughed at - all those fears deprive us of half of our abilities. This is one of the main school problems. That teacher understands it, who can teach students to study without fear of the teacher, without fear of classmates, and, the most important, without fear of a subject.”

Simon Soloveychik (1930–1996) Russia writer and philosopher

Source: The Last Book (1999), Ch.20 (In Russian, Последняя книга,1999, ISBN 5-8246-0030-9

People, Fear, School, Understanding

“They were [my] friends. Those guys were like The Monkees. They lived in this house all together… no joke, the whole band all together in the same house, and they were really fun. They were really young guys and they lived the real Rock life. Of course it all went horribly wrong later, but they were great.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked about Alice in Chains - Howard Stern Show, June 2007 ** Chris Cornell on Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, Alice in Chains, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzyZfhutYk, Solo career Era

Life, Guy, Housing

“A lot of things were lucky," said Daddy, and suddenly, while they were walking along, brought his hand down on John's shoulder and gave it a bit of a squeeze. "You'll be a seaman yet, my son." And John, for one dreadful moment, felt that something was going wrong with his eyes. A sort of wetness, and hotness… Partly salt… Pleased though he was, he found himself biting his lower lip pretty hard, and looking the other way.”

Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) English author and journalist

Way

“The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199806232215.PAA02356@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Way

“What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong…. I think one of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game. We've got to solve problems. We're problem-solvers. There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What I'm interested in is helping save lives. That's what I want to do.”

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

Answering a question regarding Katrina aftermath and what went wrong with government response — September 6, 2005. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050906.html 2000s, 2005

People, Game, Problem, Thinking

“Having eliminated the soul, modern science cannot understand the body in its most important aspect, which is its capacity for self-importance. Modern biology, particularly the theory of evolution, is based on the overriding concern for survival in all life. This is surely wrong in regard to human life. If you cannot look around you and must insist on indulging a taste for the primitive, you have only to visit the ruins of an ancient people and ponder how much of its GNP was devoted to religion, to its sense of the meaning of human life rather than mere survival.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Life, People, Religion, Soul

“It’s bizarre and disgusting to see much of America’s media making excuses for a bloodthirsty, openly genocidal death cult. Something is deeply wrong with journalism in this country.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

January 6, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/32367_Emerson-_Why_Does_The_New_York_Times_Love_Hamas&only

Death, Country

“There's no hope, but I may be wrong.”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

NPR: Weekend Edition (2 July 2005)

Hope

“And I have to give the FBI credit, that was so bad, what happened, originally, and it took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made, in light of the kind of opposition he had, with their trying to protect her from criminal prosecution, you know that. It took a lot of guts, I really disagreed with him, I was not his fan, but I'll tell you what, what he did, he brought back his reputation, he brought it back. He's got to hang tough, because there's a lot of, lotta people, want him to do the wrong thing, what he did was the right thing.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/31/donald-trump-james-comey-has-guts-grand-rapids-sot.cnn shortly after Comey announced the FBI would investigate further emails relating to Hillary Clinton, but before his statement that no incriminating information was found within them (31 October 2016) 2010s, 2016, October

People, Light

“But middle-class Americans, friends of mine, composites of friends of mine, of a liberal bent, nice people, OK people, see nothing wrong with bilingual education. In fact, they wish their own children to be bilingual. In fact, they send their kids to French schools. In fact, they ask if I know of a housekeeper who might inadvertently teach their children Spanish while she dusts under the piano. Nope.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Children, People, Education, School

“There is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it most assuredly is not a "free" line, but an intensely continent, restrained and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as "free" as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Cestus of Aglaia, chapter VI, section 72 (1865-66).

Question, Decision, Drawing

“But preference, and its consequence, neglect, is the child's most cruel wrong. The bitter feeling of comparing our own lot with another's, will come quite soon enough without its being taught in infancy.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Feeling

“My best friend is he who rights my wrongs or reproaches my mistakes.”

José de San Martín (1778–1850) Argentine general and independence leader

Mi mejor amigo es el que enmienda mis errores o reprueba mis desaciertos.
Quoted in ‪Historia Jeneral de Chile : Pt. 9. Organizacion de la Republica, 1820-1833‬ (1894) by Diego Barros Arana, p. 298

“The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

At the Vice Presidential Debates, October 5, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_1005.html 2000s, 2004

“The commitment I have made is terrible and the plastic means appear and disappear at the moment of implementation. It's terrible... And the chaos of will? What law? It’s terrible... Then I struggle with sculpture: I work, work and work and I don't know what I give. Is it interior? Is it exterior? Is it sensation? Is it delirium? Is it brain? Analysis? Synthesis? I don't know what the f… it is! Forms on forms.. confusion... The Cubists are wrong. Picasso is wrong. The academics are wrong. We're all a bunch of d.. heads.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

1912
Source: an 2nd undated letter to Gino Severini (probably July or August 1912, or November); as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008.

Law, Appearance