It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
Interpretation
It's preferable to have an approximate understanding of a situation rather than a precise but incorrect one.
This quote by John Maynard Keynes emphasizes the importance of practical understanding over theoretical precision. It suggests that being approximately correct can lead to progress and solutions, while being precisely incorrect can lead to failure and misunderstandings. In many situations, particularly in economics and decision-making, striving for accuracy is important, yet absolute precision may not be feasible or beneficial if it leads to misguided actions.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing project forecasts, I might say this quote to highlight the benefits of taking action based on available data rather than waiting for perfect predictions.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
Now, we learn that a system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system.
Basically, there are two paths you can walk: faith or fear. It's impossible to simultaneously trust God and not trust God.
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
'And how, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much.
Remember that the good angels do what they can to preserve men from sin and obtain God's honor. But they do not lose courage when men fail.
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