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.
One of the lessons learned in the Middle East is to never try to anticipate the other side's moves.
have i gone mad? im afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usualy are.
The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.
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