Daily Inspiration Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

Better to crash through a scene with conviction than to tiptoe in with technically correct timing. Tallulah Bankhead’s “I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right” is performance philosophy masquerading as personal creed, and it lands because it’s both self-mythmaking and a sly jab at the culture of cautious correctness.

Bankhead came up in an era when actresses were expected to be decorative, compliant, and grateful. Her persona was the opposite: loud, dangerous, impossible to ignore. The line takes “wrong” and strips it of moral panic, reframing it as a kind of vitality. “Strongly” is doing the heavy lifting here. It’s not celebrating ignorance; it’s celebrating commitment. A “weakly right” person might have the facts, the manners, the safe opinion, but lacks the force to move anyone. Bankhead is arguing that impact matters more than pedantic accuracy - that an idea without spine is socially useless.

There’s also a flirtation with failure baked in. Strongly wrong means you took a swing in public, risked embarrassment, maybe even scandal. That risk reads as authenticity, especially coming from someone whose career depended on commanding rooms and headlines. In the context of show business, it’s a survival tactic: audiences forgive errors when the energy is undeniable; they don’t forgive timidity.

Subtextually, it’s a permission slip for ambition and appetite - for women especially - to be full-volume even when the world would prefer them edited.