"No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so"
About this Quote
Pride makes a spectacularly unreliable compass, and La Rochefoucauld is needling the people who insist they have the steadiest hand on it. "Those that can least bear to be so" are not merely sensitive; they are structurally invested in being right. Their self-image, status, and social leverage depend on certainty. The result is a paradox with teeth: the more psychologically costly it is to admit error, the more aggressively a person will deny evidence, distort the record, and pick fights with reality itself.
The line works because it reframes wrongness as a moral and social performance rather than an intellectual accident. La Rochefoucauld, writing from the salons and court intrigues of 17th-century France, understood that being "right" was often a currency: it secured rank, protected reputation, and maintained power. If you cannot afford to lose face, you start paying interest on every mistake - doubling down, recruiting allies, rewriting motives. Wrong becomes sticky, not because the facts are unclear, but because retreat is humiliating.
There is also a sly leveling move here. He isn't praising the clever; he's skewering the fragile. The target is the brittle ego that treats correction as an attack. Subtext: the most error-prone people aren't the ignorant, but the defensively certain - the ones who turn disagreement into betrayal and learning into submission. In a culture of honor, that was court politics. In ours, it's the modern addiction to being unembarrassable.
The line works because it reframes wrongness as a moral and social performance rather than an intellectual accident. La Rochefoucauld, writing from the salons and court intrigues of 17th-century France, understood that being "right" was often a currency: it secured rank, protected reputation, and maintained power. If you cannot afford to lose face, you start paying interest on every mistake - doubling down, recruiting allies, rewriting motives. Wrong becomes sticky, not because the facts are unclear, but because retreat is humiliating.
There is also a sly leveling move here. He isn't praising the clever; he's skewering the fragile. The target is the brittle ego that treats correction as an attack. Subtext: the most error-prone people aren't the ignorant, but the defensively certain - the ones who turn disagreement into betrayal and learning into submission. In a culture of honor, that was court politics. In ours, it's the modern addiction to being unembarrassable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
|---|---|
| Source | From "Maxims" (Maximes) by François de La Rochefoucauld — English translations of his Maximes contain the aphorism: "No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so". |
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