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Who really said it

There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing

Not Seneca — an anonymous English proverb Anonymous Originator unknown · in print by 1850
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

This is a proverb with no known author, not a line from Seneca. The earliest appearance Quote Investigator documents is an 1850 essay on British rule in India in De Bow’s Southern and Western Review — “There is no right way of doing a wrong thing” — and the Seneca credit does not surface until a Baton Rouge newspaper column in 1955.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing” Anonymous English proverb, in print by 1850. Not Seneca; the Seneca credit is first documented in 1955. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Seneca the Younger. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of character, truth and justice. Theme: "There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where the line actually comes from

Attributed to
Anonymous — an English-language proverb
Earliest documented
De Bow’s Southern and Western Review, July 1850
Excerpt shown
Charles Jewett: Life and Recollections (1880), p. 411
Credited to Seneca
First documented 1955, in a Baton Rouge newspaper column

A man may do a right thing in a wrong way; but he cannot do a wrong thing in a right way. For there is no right way of doing wrong. If there were, it is a question whether he would not be as badly off in doing right in a wrong way, as he would be in doing wrong in a right way. 1880, quoted as table talk

Charles Jewett, the temperance campaigner, in the “Table Talk” chapter of William M. Thayer’s 1880 biography. This is the nineteenth-century shape of the saying — “a wrong thing,” spelled out at length. The clipped modern catchphrase, with “the wrong thing,” turns up much later in Quote Investigator’s citation record.

Digitised book, Boston 1880
Read Charles Jewett: Life and Recollections at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing

The paper trail

  • 1850 — the oldest appearance on record. An essay on British rule in India by “W. Adam, Esq.” in De Bow’s Southern and Western Review argues that “There is no right way of doing a wrong thing; and while the relation itself is allowed to continue, the mode of acting under that relation must partake of its vicious and unnatural character,” as documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1880 — the temperance lecturer Charles Jewett is quoted saying “he cannot do a wrong thing in a right way. For there is no right way of doing wrong,” on page 411 of Charles Jewett: Life and Recollections ↗ — a scan anyone can read today.
  • 1955 — the first Seneca credit anyone has found: a Baton Rouge column presents it as something “the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca,” said, more than a century after the proverb was already circulating, traced by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1974–2006 — the modern wording takes hold: a 1974 Connecticut newspaper filler about Washington, Dick Armey handing it to Waylon Jennings in 1996, and finally Toby Keith’s “Ain’t No Right Way” on White Trash with Money ↗ in 2006.

No rights status can be asserted for the quotation itself: it is an anonymous proverb with no identified author and no identifiable first work, and the exact modern wording cannot be tied to any specific publication. Nothing shown on this page is encumbered — the 1850 periodical and the 1880 biography excerpted above are long out of copyright in the United States — but that says nothing about the saying, which nobody has ever been shown to own.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who else gets the credit

An ownerless proverb attracts owners. At least four names have been attached to this one, and the paper trail shows every one of them arriving long after the saying was already in print.

Seneca the Younger Not in his works

The earliest Seneca credit on record is a “Pull Up A Chair” column in the State Times Advocate of Baton Rouge on 6 May 1955, which introduced it as something “the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, said,” per Quote Investigator ↗. That is more than a century after the saying was already in American print, and the line appears nowhere in Wikiquote’s Seneca collection ↗.

Waylon Jennings Secondhand credit

In April 1996 the congressman Dick Armey told the Dallas Morning News, “Waylon Jennings has a great line: ‘There ain’t no right way to do the wrong thing,’” as recorded by Quote Investigator ↗.

Toby Keith A song, not an origin

“Ain’t No Right Way,” written with Scotty Emerick and Dean Dillon, is track 9 on White Trash with Money ↗, released 11 April 2006 — the chorus uses a proverb roughly a century and a half older than the record.

Harold S. Kushner Quoter, not coiner

Goodreads files “There is no right way to do a wrong thing” under Kushner’s Living a Life That Matters ↗, which is where a great many readers first meet it — but the wording predates the book by generations.

Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that the aphorism was in circulation by 1850 and that Anonymous is the reasonable attribution — and reports that the compilers of The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, having found a citation before 1900, moved it to their appendix of “No Longer Modern Proverbs.”

Context

A proverb with a very long career

Some misattributions are inventions. This one is a genuine saying that simply never had an owner. It surfaces in American and British print through the second half of the nineteenth century in a cluster of near-identical shapes — an 1850 argument against British rule in India, an 1880 temperance lecture, an 1891 newspaper filler credited only to another paper, an 1898 church magazine — which is exactly what a proverb in circulation looks like. Nobody coined it on the record; it was already common property.

Because it has no author, it has been handed to a lot of people. A 1955 Louisiana columnist gave it to Seneca. A congressman gave it to Waylon Jennings in 1996. Toby Keith put it in a song chorus in 2006. Each of those is a person repeating a line that was already a century or more old when they got to it.

It was never Seneca’s to lose — it was already everybody’s.

Why the wording keeps shifting

The nineteenth-century printings say “a wrong thing”; the modern catchphrase says “the wrong thing.” Quote Investigator’s citation record shows that definite-article form arriving late — in a 1974 Connecticut newspaper “Today’s Chuckle” item aimed at Washington. Proverbs behave like this: they get smoothed, shortened and re-pointed at whatever the speaker is annoyed about, which is one reason no single printed instance can be called the original.

The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (Yale University Press, 2012), compiled by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder and Fred R. Shapiro, initially treated the saying as a twentieth-century coinage. Quote Investigator reports that the compilers found a citation before 1900 and moved it into the book’s appendix of “No Longer Modern Proverbs.”

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Truth Justice

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thingquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: dated citations from 1850 onward, the 1955 Seneca credit, and the conclusion that Anonymous is the right attribution.
Charles Jewett: Life and Recollections (1880)archive.org

Full scan of William M. Thayer's 1880 biography; the aphorism appears in Jewett's reported table talk on page 411.
Seneca the Youngeren.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced, disputed and misattributed collections for Seneca — this line appears in none of them.
Seneca the Youngeren.wikipedia.org

Life dates (c. 4 BC – AD 65), his role under Nero, and the list of works that actually survive.
The Dictionary of Modern Proverbsyalebooks.yale.edu

Yale University Press page for the 2012 Doyle / Mieder / Shapiro reference work that dates English-language proverbs.
White Trash with Money (Toby Keith, 2006)en.wikipedia.org

Confirms the album's 11 April 2006 release and track 9, "Ain't No Right Way," written by Keith, Scotty Emerick and Dean Dillon.

The name it gets pinned on

Why Seneca?

Seneca the Younger

c. 4 BC – AD 65 · Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist and statesman

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher, tragedian and Roman statesman who served as tutor and then adviser to the emperor Nero. His surviving work — the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, a dozen ethical essays, the Naturales Quaestiones and nine tragedies — is one of the largest bodies of ancient Stoic writing we still have, which is exactly why unsourced moral one-liners drift toward his name. This particular sentence is not among them: it appears nowhere in the sourced sections of his Wikiquote page, and the proverb is first recorded in English in the nineteenth century, nearly eighteen centuries after his death.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this

Anonymous proverb. Earliest documented appearance: W. Adam, “Government of British India,” De Bow’s Southern and Western Review (New Orleans), July 1850, 2, as documented in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing,” May 22, 2012. A related nineteenth-century form is quoted in William M. Thayer, Charles Jewett: Life and Recollections (Boston: James H. Earle, 1880), 411.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-is-no-right-way-to-do-the-wrong-thing/

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