Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Seymour

Permission to be wrong is the stealth radicalism in Charles Seymour's line. A historian telling you "Think wrongly if you please" isn’t blessing ignorance; he’s puncturing the social prestige of being correct. In Seymour’s world, correctness is often just conformity with better footnotes. The opening clause lowers the temperature of debate by stripping away the moral panic that treats error as a character flaw. If you’re allowed to be wrong, you’re also allowed to take intellectual risks, to follow an argument where it leads, and to revise it without humiliation.

The second half lands like a gavel: "in all cases, think for yourself". That absolutism matters. Seymour isn’t describing a preference; he’s laying down an ethic. For a historian, the command is also methodological: don’t outsource judgment to tradition, party, church, or the loudest consensus. Read the archive, interrogate the sources, notice who benefits from a story being repeated. The subtext is that secondhand thinking is the real vice, because it turns citizens into stenographers of someone else’s power.

Contextually, Seymour’s career sits in the early-to-mid 20th century, when mass propaganda, ideologically disciplined parties, and the professionalization of expertise all rose together. His sentence threads that needle: respect knowledge, but don’t let "expertise" become a permission slip to stop reasoning. Wrong ideas can be corrected; unexamined ones get institutionalized.