Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Armour

Armour’s line lands like a polite dinner-table quip that quietly upends the whole seating chart. By framing politics as obsessed with “right or left” rather than “right or wrong,” he needles the lazy geometry of ideology: the comforting sense that if you can place yourself on a spectrum, you’ve done the hard work of moral reasoning. The joke is in the near-rhyme and the clean pivot from spatial metaphor to ethical judgment. It’s a poet’s move - sound and symmetry delivering a shiv.

The intent isn’t to claim morality is simple; it’s to accuse political culture of preferring team labels to accountability. “Right or left” evokes uniforms, factions, and the tribal pleasure of belonging. “Right or wrong” invokes consequence, harm, and the unglamorous task of evaluating specific actions. Armour suggests that over “years, or all too long,” political debate has become a kind of self-referential sport: winning the argument inside your camp matters more than whether the policy works, whether it’s just, whether it breaks people.

The subtext is an impatience with performative principle. Ideological identity can masquerade as virtue, letting politicians and voters outsource their consciences to a brand. Armour, writing in a century defined by mass politics and media amplification, is registering an old problem in a modern key: the slide from persuasion to alignment, from deliberation to sorting. The line still stings because it flatters no one. It doesn’t elevate “the center” as wise; it demands something harder - moral seriousness that survives partisan gravity.