Quotes about wrong (4315 quotes, page 43)

“No one I imagine is so stupid as to believe that truth or even an approximation of truth is derived from counting pieces of marked paper and that the largest pile of papers is it. What makes democracy so fragile is the certain knowledge, even by the winners, that it is often wrong and if they think it’s right now, then it’s either been wrong at some time in the past or will be at some time in the future. There is then a shaky agreement on both sides of a democratic debate that there is some more fundamental reason for using this method to make decisions than that it is always right. In Western Europe over the last century or so that shaky agreement has not always held together and indeed it still is far from ordinary worldwide. A common everyday reason why most people accept democratic results is that they are rarely always on the losing side. And in the case of government elections they can have another opportunity to persuade the majority that the opinion they hold is correct and hope that the mistakes of the previous few years are not so very bad. On a much deeper level however respecting the “will of the people” comes from a profoundly scary place.”

Justin Barrett (1971) Irish activist

A Republic of Innocent Dead Cannot Live https://nationalparty.ie/a-republic-of-innocent-dead-cannot-live/ (June 4, 2018)

Democracy , Imagination , Time , Past

“To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.”

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947) American social reformer, suffragist (1859-1947)

Quoted in Great Women of the Suffrage Movement (We the People: Industrial America) by Dana Meachen Rau (2005)

Future

“Men are not zoophilists (being-lovers). Not many of them are philanthropists (man-lovers). They are barbarians. And the wrongs inflicted by them on non-human beings are for the most part inflicted simply because they feel like it. Human nature is so constructed that men get pleasure out of doing the most monstrous deeds. It is worse than this. Human nature is so constructed that it contains elements which demand exercise, demand motor expression, and in whose expression the most lamentable and appalling effects are produced.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 154

Nature , Pleasure , Men , Lovers

“When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right.'”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything.
Source: 1970s, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149

Thinking , Painting , Color

“It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter From Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. James Madison, 19 July 1788
1780s

Idea , Falseness

“Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.'
'You think so?”

Ernest Hemingway book The Garden of Eden

'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'
Colonel John Boyle and David in Ch. 7
The Garden of Eden (1986)

Thinking

“Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.””

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman. No husband or day care can adequately substitute for a mother’s attention. My feminist heroes are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of “having it all.”
Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 89

Women

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) American politician and businesswoman from the state of Georgia

Statement from House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy https://republicanleader.house.gov/leader-mccarthy-condemns-comparisons-to-the-holocaust/, 25 May 2021
About

History , Decision

“Simply, libertarians do not advocate the initiation of force, fraud, or theft to achieve social or political goals. If you refused to contribute to my favorite charity, and I took your money at gunpoint anyway, I’d be stealing from you. Similarly, if I vote for taxes to force you to contribute to that charity, I’m asking the government to take your money—at gunpoint, if necessary… Wrong doesn’t turn into right, just because the majority agrees to it. Minorities have no protection if they have to depend upon the majority for it.”

Mary Ruwart (1949) American scientist and libertarian activist

Source: Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked, (2012), p. 18

Money , Fraud , Dependency

“We are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation, to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences. We ask ourselves always, “What went wrong?””

Kristian Williams (1974) American historian

and for answers we look to the seconds, minutes, or hours before the incident. Perhaps this leads us to fault the individual officer, perhaps it leads us to excuse him. Such thinking, derived as it is from legal reasoning, does not take us far beyond the case in question. And thus, such inquiries are rarely very illuminating. The shooting of Oscar Grant, the beating of Rodney King, the arrest of Marquette Frye, the killing of Arthur McDuffie — any of these may be explained in terms of the actions and attitudes of the particular officers at the scene, the events preceding the violence (including the actions of the victims), and the circumstances in which the officers found themselves. Indeed, juries and police administrators have frequently found it possible to excuse police violence with such explanations. The unrest that followed these incidents, however, cannot be explained in such narrow terms. To understand the rioting, one must consider a whole range of related issues, including the conditions of life in the Black community, the role of the police in relation to that community, and the history and pattern of similar abuses. If we are to understand the phenomenon of police brutality, we must get beyond particular cases. We can better understand the actions of individual police officers if we understand the institution of which they are a part. That institution, in turn, can best be examined if we have an understanding of its origins, its social function, and its relation to larger systems like capitalism and white supremacy.
Rights, riots and police brutality, 2020

Thinking

“The First Amendment is not limited to the right to be right; it also enshrines the right to be wrong.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

“The Wrong Response to Holtzman”, New York Times, Dec. 30, 1987

“The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

Hurt , Pain , Time , Learning

“Every physician knows the numerous sources of error which may lead an able advocate to wrong conclusions. The difficult art of statistics, which is no simple arrangement of numbers, but often requires very elaborate calculations, may lend itself to error; the neglect of some facts, or the undue prominence of others, the comparison of dissimilar conditions, or observations made on too short a scale or for too short a period—all these various conditions must be considered as sources of possible error.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 754 https://books.google.com/books?id=85o2AAAAMAAJ&pg=754
Medicine and Morality (1881)

Error , Art

“What I am able to say concerning the direction and aim of our terms, I have already said repeatedly. To put an end to the war with a durable peace that will compensate us for all the wrongs we have suffered and will safeguard the existence and future of a strong Germany—that is our aim.”

Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) German chancellor during World War I

Speech to the Reichstag (27 February 1917), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany from Defeat to Conquest, 1913–1933 (1945), p. 91

Peace , War , Future , Strong

“If you are right among the wrong people, you may even be right, but you will still be seen as wrong.”

Valter Bitencourt Júnior (1994) Brazilian poet and writer

People

“Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1976-79) On the foolishness of "natural language programming" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html (EWD 667)
1970s

People , Error

“The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (2017), p. 343

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

“Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

“Democracy's premise rests on the notion that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than it's wrong; that given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of happiness, your population will develop its talents, its intellect, its better judgment; that over time its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be enlarged.”

Ben Fountain (1958) American writer

Democracy , Happiness , Time , Wisdom

“I don’t want revolutions. Categorically, because innocent heads will fly into the revolution and into all these wars. I think this is wrong. No revolutions. Do everything that is possible, but to prevent this from happening. At both sides. I would choose North Korea. I don't want sacrifices. It means that some tactics, some experience, some wisdom are lacking for people who are against this regime. That's all.”

Chulpan Khamatova (1975) Russian actress

On why she supports Vladimir Putin in Чулпан Хаматова: «Я очень много чего боюсь» (7 June 2012) https://tvrain.ru/teleshow/sobchak_zhivem/chulpan_khamatova_ya_by_vybrala_severnuyu_koreyu_a_ne_revolyutsiyu-286479/

War , People , Flying , Thinking

“There was something fundamentally wrong with our economic system. It was based upon injustice and could not last.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons
Source: Speech to the Welsh National Liberal Federation in Rhyl (9 July 1926), quoted in The Times (10 July 1926), p. 16

“Ideologies are like arseholes: everyone's got one, we use it every day, but you very rarely look at your own unless something's gone wrong.”

Abigail Thorn (1993) British actress and YouTuber

Source: Jordan Peterson's Ideology | Philosophy Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m81q-ZkfBm0, 09.04.2021

“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Roumania.”

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania (1875–1938) last Queen consort of Romania as the wife of King Ferdinand I

Dorothy Parker, "Comment"

Love , Life

“There is no wrath like the cold fury of the professional spirit proved wrong by outsiders, and no folly comparable to its reactions under such conditions.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Volume I, p. 694
War Memoirs (1938)

“Scientific theories can always be improved and are improved. That is one of the glories of science. It is the authoritarian view of the Universe that is frozen in stone and cannot be changed, so that once it is wrong, it is wrong forever.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Nearest Star" (1989) (reprinted in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 82)
General sources

Universe , Science , Change

“The man who has never made a mistake has no need of an eraser; just so the man who has never done anything wrong has no need of a Redeemer.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: The Armor of God (1943), Ch. 1, p. 4

“The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part Two, Chapter XIX

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Source: Curious Character

Universe , Thinking , Way , Feeling

“And to everyone who ever tried to convince me that I couldn't win, thank you for inspiring me to prove you wrong. Na-na na-na boo-boo.”

MJ Hegar (1976) American Air Force veteran, politician, author

Source: Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman's Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front (2017), p. 292

“If people are criticising your work, take it in the right spirit and try to find out what is wrong. I made a lot of mistakes on my first film and told myself not to do it again. Remember that you’re not making a film to keep it in a box, it’s for the people.”

Rima Das (1982) Indian Assamese film maker

Film Companion Article - Rima Das Gives Tips On Zero Budget Filmmaking - 4 November 2017 https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/bollywood-interview/rima-das-gives-tips-on-zero-budget-filmmaking/ - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210728182917/https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/bollywood-interview/rima-das-gives-tips-on-zero-budget-filmmaking/

People , Box

“There is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable.”

Sarah Schulman (1958) American writer

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

People

“It could have happened to anybody. People are always saying, 'He didn't apologize.' I don't think I did anything wrong that I need to apologize for. It was a clean hit.”

Jack Tatum (1948–2010) All-American college football player, professional football player, defensive back, safety, College Footbal…

about the Darryl Stingley hit.
Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum by Jack Tatum with Bill Kushner (1996)

People , Thinking

“If eval() is the answer, you're almost certainly asking the wrong question.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

PHP.net: eval http://php.net/eval, Anonymous comment, 2004
PHP in a Nutshell https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/php-in-a/0596100671/re47.html by Paul Hudson, 2005

Question

“We can allow for Slow Medicine beds in our hospitals so that doctors have enough time to find out what is really wrong with a patient, and patients have enough time to heal.”

Victoria Sweet Physician

Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (2017)

Time

“Misogyny is absolutely wrong whether it's a man against a woman or a woman against a man.”

Dominic Raab (1974) British politician (born 1974)

Interviewed on the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58814271 (6 October 2021)
2020s, 2021

“Do you know why this world is as bad as it is? […] it is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doer to light.”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty (1877), Ch. XXXVIII, p. 192

Business , Light , People , Thinking

“When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.”

Charles Sheffield book Resurgence

Source: The Heritage Universe, Resurgence (2002), Chapter 20, “Tally on Down” (p. 246)

“When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions.”

Charles Sheffield book Convergence

Source: The Heritage Universe, Convergence (1997), Chapter 23 (p. 488)

Time , Personality

“First we made the wheel
Then we made the car
Then we made the bomb
Now it's all gone wrong”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"What we Made" (song)
("What we Made" on YouTube (filmed at Chernobyl)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOOl08NQWU8
(+ Lyrics version of "What we Made" on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXAOGn0CfJk
Studio albums, What We Made (2007)

Cars