Leadership Quote by Edward Koch

Consensus is a lousy compass, and Koch knew it from the inside. "When all are wrong, everyone is right" reads like a shrug in sentence form, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at the way groups launder bad judgment into social comfort. In politics, being "right" is often less about accuracy than about belonging to the prevailing mood. If everyone misreads the moment together, no one pays the price alone. Error becomes a kind of amnesty.

The line works because it flips a moral intuition. We assume mass agreement should get us closer to truth; Koch points out how it can do the opposite, especially in systems designed to reward alignment over candor. The subtext is defensive and accusatory at once: don’t look for accountability where incentives are collective. It’s a warning about the seductive logic of institutions - city hall, party machines, the media cycle - where shared assumptions harden into unquestioned "common sense."

Context matters: Koch’s New York was a petri dish for this phenomenon. Fiscal crises, crime panics, bureaucratic inertia, headline-driven politics - all settings where everyone can convince themselves that a bad policy is "responsible", "necessary", or simply "what you do". The aphorism also hints at why reform is lonely work. To be right when "all are wrong" is to be isolated; to be wrong with everyone is to be safe. Koch isn’t celebrating relativism. He’s indicting the crowd’s ability to turn mistakes into legitimacy.