Wrongheaded Quotes & Sayings

A wrongheaded world," sighed Shiloh Davydov, "where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed. — David Mitchell

Republicans are being counseled to move the party to the left, but in my experience, those who advocate more liberal policies for the GOP are wrongheaded or Democrats, or both. — Liz Cheney

Ither immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light. — Henry Hazlitt

The political world was anathema; its activists, both retro and progressive, seemed wrongheaded and dreamy. The revolutionaries, armed or peaceful, had no notion of what should happen after they "won." Who would rule? The "people"? Please. What did that mean? The best outcome would be to introduce a new idea into the population that perhaps a politician would act on. The rest was theater seeking an audience. Wealth alone explained humanity's evil, and he was determined to live without deference to it. — Toni Morrison

Saddlebags and called for water to be heated. He knelt and removed his outer tunic and rolled the white sleeves of the inner one. He rubbed astringent oil into his hands and along his forearms to the elbow, to the amusement of the nephew, who drew a wrongheaded moral from the notion of a physician who medicated himself and not his patient. The stranger leaned in to sniff at the Italian's breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow's pulse. While he worked, he asked about the — Michael Chabon

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people. — Jared Diamond

If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed. — David H. Hackworth

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself. — Douglas Adams

What hurts this person is not the occurrence itself, for another person might not feel oppressed by this situation at all. What is hurting this person is the response he or she has uncritically adopted. It is not a demonstration of kindness or friendship to the people we care about to join them in indulging in wrongheaded, negative feelings. — Epictetus

But veteran lawmakers torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against Washington politics. When you see what can happen to a page or a junior congressman, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what political power really is, .. Who are we to impose this emotional albatross on public servants? As a nation, we pretend to elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make them a special class to suffer for our sins over wrongheaded laws, or pay a continuing emotional price for securing their future careers. — Leon Kass

One common adage ... that is completely wrongheaded is: You can't go broke taking profits. That's precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits. — William Eckhardt

There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture. — Charlie Munger

Raphael watched, and gradually he began to understand them. At first it was not even a theory, but rather a kind of intuition. He found that he could look at any one of them and almost smell the impending crisis. That was the key word - crisis. At first it seemed too dramatic a term to apply to situations resulting from their bumbling mismanagement of their lives or deliberate wrongheaded stupidity, but they themselves reacted as if these situations were in fact crises. — David Eddings

The only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded? — Margaret Halsey

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them. — Jennifer Egan

Tolerance also requires a public acceptance of beliefs and values at odds with our own, beliefs and values that we may consider wrongheaded and even immoral. ... In this context, a morally passionate citizen becomes strangely intolerable. — Wendy Brown

I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they're important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators
these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others. — Lisa Unger

Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room. — Elizabeth McCracken

Here's why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash. Here's why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other. Here's why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an "if-then" reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction - and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment. — Daniel H. Pink

It is not a demonstration of kindness or friendship to the people we care about to join them in indulging in wrongheaded, negative feelings. We do a better service to ourselves and others by remaining detached and avoiding melodramatic reactions. — Epictetus

Reject without regret whatever seems on reflection wrongheaded, dull, destructive, or irrelevant to your vision. It's just as important to be able to discriminate between helpful and unhelpful criticism as it is to be able to write. — Janet Burroway

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style. — Terence McKenna

Drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrongheaded governmental policies have destroyed many more. I think it's obvious that after 40 years of war on drugs, it has not worked. There should be decriminalization of drugs. — Kofi Annan

Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren't even really about your body, they're about society and our society's wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a "good" body. Your body didn't do anything wrong. What's fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body. — Golda Poretsky

Oh, my father sighs, if only we had a screwdriver that could unscrew wrongheaded ideas; if only we had a hammer to drive home good intentions; if only we had a pipe wrench to tighten hearts in everlasting love; a saw that we could use to make a clean cut with the past! — Stefano Benni

Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrongheaded pseudointellectualism is far worse. — Jonathan Wilson

If I was so malicious or off-color or just plain wrongheaded that I had to constantly censor my conversation with a minister, then I needed the experience anyway. — Charlaine Harris

Once the fire from the retaliatory strike dies down, the American people are going to find out that it is the Clinton Administration's wrongheaded policies that resulted in the creation of this terrorist haven in Afghanistan in the first place. — Dana Rohrabacher

The music
the making of music and the performing of music
produced memories, many good, some bad, some difficult. But he knew for sure that he'd spent too much of that time living not in the present moment of creating or playing music but in the expectation or hope of some reward, some success. He had always been waiting for his life to start when that happened, when the recognition came. It had taken him twenty years to realize how utterly wrongheaded that was.
It was as if the twenty years didn't amount to much, that he hadn't actually been present for so much of his life. — Graham Joyce

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. — Chinua Achebe