Great Throughts Treasury

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday." - Alexander Pope

"A noble part of every true life is to learn to undo what has been wrongly done. A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser to-day that he was yesterday." - Alexander Pope

"Suspicion breeds rivals for herself... The suspicious man condemns the good faith of all... Suspicion is an unspoken wrong to tested worth." - Publius Syrus

"Speak the truth by all means; be bold and fearless in your rebuke of error, and in your keener rebuke of wrong doing; but be human, and loving, and gentle, and brotherly the while." - William Morley Punshon

"What most increases anger is the feeling that one is in the wrong." -

"Remorse is the consciousness of doing wrong with no sense of love; penitence the same consciousness with the feeling of sorrow and tenderness added." -

"Responsibility is measured, not by the amount of injury resulting from wrong action, but by the distinctness with which conscience has the opportunity of distinguishing between the right and the wrong." -

"No act is ever, in virtue of falling under some general description, necessarily actually right... moral acts often (as every one knows) and indeed always (on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them a the same time prima facie right and prima facie wrong; there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa." - W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

"Every individual character is in the right that is in strict consistence with itself. Self-contradiction is the only wrong." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Be not ashamed to confess that you have been in the wrong. It is but owning what you need not be ashamed of - that you now have more sense than you had before, to see your error; more humility to acknowledge it, more grace to correct it." - Jeremiah Seed

"Advice may be wrong, but examples prove themselves." -

"When the truth is in your way, you are on the wrong road." -

"Self-expression can be wrong as well as right... When self-expression is identified with irrational surrender to lower instincts, it ends by making the person a slave to those passions. Self-denial is not a renunciation of freedom; it is rather the taming of what is savage and base in our nature for what is higher and better. It is a release from imprisonment by our lusts and passions." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"At times a person might feel so embarrassed and discouraged over the wrongs he has committed that he will give up trying to improve. Despair is wrong. You always have the ability to improve yourself and should never become discouraged." - Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, aka Beis Halevi

"We are wrong to fear superiority of mind and soul; this superiority is very moral, for understanding everything makes a person tolerant and the capacity to feel deeply inspires great goodness." -

"If your morals make you dreary, depend on it that they are wrong." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

"He who thinks no man above him but for his virtue, and none below him but for his vice, can never be obsequious or assuming in a wrong place, but will frequently emulate men in rank below him, and pity those above him." -

"The angriest person in a controversy is the one most liable to be in the wrong." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

"Man’s actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for ethics." -

"Better is the wrong with sincerity, than the right with falsehood." -

"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon bronze, time will efface it; if we build temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with just principles of action, with fear of wrong and love of right, we engrave on those tables something which no time can obliterate, and which will brighten and brighten through all eternity." - Daniel Webster

"The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought." - Harry Weinberger

"Slander is a very gross evil; it implies two who do wrong, and one who is doubly wronged." - Artabanus the Hyrcanian or Artabanus of Persia NULL

"Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

"The ideas of the average decently informed person are so warped, and of perspective, and ignorant, and entirely perverse and wrong and crude, on nearly every moral subject, that the task of discussing anything with him seriously and fully and to the end is simply appalling." - Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett

"Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates bad regimen." - Paul Bourget, fully Paul Charles Joseph Bourget

"The thing to do when you're impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. It is always on our left, as at arms length. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you have the feeling that your companion is there watching you. How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us? Death is the only wise advise that we have. When we feel that everything is gong wrong, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong. That nothing really matters outside its touch. Ask death's advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will never tap them... It doesn't matter what the decision is. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions we make in the face of our inevitable death." -

"Wine is like anger, for it makes us strong, blind and impatient, and it leads us wrong; the strength is quickly lost; we feel the error long." -

"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong." - John Diefenbaker, fully John George Diefenbaker

"One watch set right will do to set many by; one that goes wrong may be the means of misleading a whole neighborhood; and the same may be said of example." - Lewis Dilwyn, fully Monsignor Dilwyn W Lewis

"What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong." - Norman Douglas, aka George Norman Douglas

"May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done to us? That we may forgive it." -

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded in another step forward." -

"Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past - the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receives." - Tyron Edwards

"Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong." - Tyron Edwards

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment may at any time prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein

"Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarded who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome." - Charles W. Eliot

"Let no man be sorry he has done good because others have done evil. If a man has acted right, he has done well, though alone; if wrong, the sanction of all mankind will not justify him." - Henry Fielding

"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty." - Henry Ford

"Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong." - William Ewart Gladstone

"It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right." - William Ewart Gladstone

"When a man is wrong and won't admit is, he always gets angry." - Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

"We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things." - Mark Harris

"The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained... There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do... It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way." - Henry Robert Harrower

"If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainly of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be." - Benjamin R. Haydon

"It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman

"Judging only by outer appearances is a mistake, because things are rarely what they seem... Disapproval of a person is disapproval of God. There is a great difference between being judgmental and using good judgment. You have to love each person’s divine essence, but you do not have to like someone’s inappropriate behavior. Wrong judgment impedes your spiritual growth." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses." -