Life & Wisdom Quote by William Strunk, Jr.

Strunk’s line is a little ice-cold on purpose: it treats hesitation not as caution but as a moral and practical failure. Coming from the co-author of The Elements of Style, it reads like a stylistic commandment disguised as life advice. Strunk isn’t praising recklessness; he’s staging a hierarchy of sins in which an imperfect decision beats the slow erosion caused by dithering. Wrong can be corrected, revised, edited. Irresolution just accumulates.

The intent is disciplinary. Strunk is talking to the kind of person who knows the rules, sees the options, and still refuses to commit. In writing, that looks like the sentence endlessly rearranged, the thesis softened into fog, the verb swapped out until nothing actually happens. In life, it’s the same posture: a preference for keeping doors open that quietly becomes an inability to walk through any of them. The subtext is that clarity is earned through action, not through preemptive self-protection.

Context matters: Strunk wrote during an era that prized directness in prose and decisiveness in public character, a cultural mood shaped by industrial efficiency and wartime pragmatism. His aphorism smuggles that ethic into the writing desk. It’s also a rhetorical trick: by making “wrong” sound less damning than “irresolute,” he reframes fear of error as the real enemy. The result is bracing, even slightly merciless - exactly the tone Strunk used to bully writers into being readable.