Linus Pauling — "I have never been afraid to be wrong."
I have never been afraid to be wrong.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Linus Pauling
"I have always been an optimist, and I believe that the future is bright."
"I am an optimist. I believe that the human race will solve its problems."
"The only way to cope with a problem is to go right at it, and the only way to solve a problem is to keep on working at it until you've solved it."
"Do you think that an American who insists on making up his own mind, who objects to being told what to do, to being pushed around by officious officials, is thereby made un-American? I do not. I think…"
"Science is the search for truth, but it is not the search for certainty. When science is used to search for certainty, it becomes something other than science."
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Being wrong is not shameful — it is part of honest thinking. This expresses intellectual courage: willingness to advance ideas, test them against reality, and accept correction without ego damage. Real progress requires staking a position that might fail. Fear of error paralyzes inquiry; accepting fallibility as normal is what lets a thinker keep moving forward rather than retreating into safe silence.
Relevance to Linus Pauling
Pauling won two unshared Nobel Prizes — Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962 — proving his willingness to be right boldly. He also championed vitamin C megadosing, a position widely rejected by mainstream medicine, and pursued the triple-helix DNA structure before being corrected by Watson and Crick. He treated error as data, not defeat, funding decades of controversial positions without abandoning rigorous inquiry.
The era
Pauling worked through the mid-twentieth century Cold War and McCarthyism, when publicly advocating nuclear disarmament could cost a scientist their passport — as it cost him. Scientific orthodoxy also hardened post-WWII, making heterodox positions professionally risky. His willingness to be wrong publicly, whether on DNA structure or vitamin therapy, was a deliberate posture against credentialism and conformity in postwar American science culture.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].