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Who really said it

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it

Not Leo Tolstoy — an unsourced maxim Unknown Origin undocumented · circulated under Tolstoy’s name
Not found in the named source, or in any Tolstoy work searched; no alternative originator documented. Rights unconfirmed

Every popular posting names the same book — Tolstoy’s A Confession — and the sentence is not in it, in either of two independent English translations. A word-search across roughly thirty megabytes of Tolstoy in English turns up neither the sentence nor the phrases “majority share” and “cease to be wrong,” and no earlier speaker has been documented for the line either.

Last verified 10 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it” popularly credited to Leo Tolstoy, and usually to his book A Confession, but the sentence appears in neither of two English translations of that book nor anywhere else in his works. No originator has been documented. Traced by Quotle.info, 10 Aug 2026.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Leo Tolstoy. 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.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of truth, justice and character. Theme: "Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The book everyone names, and what is actually in it

Claimed source
A Confession (Исповедь), written 1879–80
Translations checked
Aylmer Maude, A Confession and What I Believe (Oxford University Press, 1921); and My Confession, My Religion, The Gospel in Brief (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1899)
Result
Phrase absent from both. Neither translation contains the sentence, the words “majority share,” or the words “cease to be wrong.”
Wider search
Absent from 45 further Tolstoy titles in English, from Chronicling America, and from Wikisource full text. No documented originator.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. No source located

Shown as it circulates. There is no fuller original context to give, because no original has been found — in Tolstoy or anywhere else.

A Confession — complete Maude translation at Wikisource

How we verified this

No rights status is asserted, because no source work has been identified. The wording cannot be traced to any published text by Tolstoy or anyone else, so there is no first-publication date on which to base a public-domain or in-copyright determination. Tolstoy’s own writings and the pre-1931 English translations checked here are separately in the public domain in the United States — but that says nothing about a sentence that is not in them.

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

How the credit went wrong

This is an unusually well-behaved misattribution: it is not vague. Almost every posting supplies the same author and the same book, which is what makes it easy to disprove and hard to dislodge.

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession Not in the book

Goodreads ↗ carries it as “— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession,” and that pairing is repeated across the aggregator sites. The book is short and fully digitised. Neither Aylmer Maude’s 1921 translation ↗ nor the 1899 Thomas Y. Crowell translation ↗ contains the sentence, or the words “majority share,” or the words “cease to be wrong.”

Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikiquote Uncited topic page

The line is absent from Wikiquote’s Leo Tolstoy page ↗, which does have a sourced Confession (1882) section. It survives only on the topic page Relativism ↗, where the whole citation reads “Leo Tolstoy, A Confession” — no translator, no edition, no page.

Nobody, so far Undocumented

No earlier speaker or writer has been established. A phrase search of the Library of Congress Chronicling America ↗ newspaper archive returns nothing, and Quote Investigator ↗ has never published on it. Reassigning the line to a different famous name would repeat the original error.

The thought is old and the wording is not Tolstoy’s. The nearest documented ancestor — that a crowd cannot make a falsehood true — is far older than the Tolstoy credit: Quote Investigator traces “the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood” ↗ to Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766.

Context

Why this one sticks to Tolstoy

The sentence is a good maxim wearing a borrowed coat. Its logic — that a headcount cannot convert a wrong into a right — is genuinely close to what Tolstoy spent his last thirty years arguing, which is precisely why nobody stops to check it. He did dismiss the crowd as an alibi: in Aylmer Maude’s 1911 collection of Tolstoy’s essays and letters ↗, the essay “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” picks apart the excuse that people drink and smoke “because everybody does it,” and concludes something more powerful must be at work. Same instinct. Different sentence.

What makes the attribution collapse is the citation attached to it. The crowd-sourced version of this quote does not stop at “Tolstoy” — it names A Confession, a short, famous, fully digitised book. That specificity is checkable, and it does not survive the check. A quote that had merely floated free might still be a stray line from an untranslated letter; a quote pinned to the wrong page of the right author is a different animal.

A headcount cannot convert a wrong into a right — but a headcount of blog posts cannot convert a maxim into a quotation, either.

What was actually searched

A Confession, twice. The Aylmer Maude translation (Oxford University Press, 1921) and the earlier Thomas Y. Crowell translation (New York, 1899). Neither contains the phrase; neither contains “majority share” or “cease to be wrong.”

The wider corpus. Forty-five Tolstoy titles in English from Project Gutenberg — including The Kingdom of God Is Within You, What Is Art?, My Religion, What to Do?, Resurrection, War and Peace and Anna Karenina — plus Maude’s Essays and Letters, Recollections and Essays and The Slavery of Our Times from the Internet Archive. Not one of those texts contains the phrase, the words “majority share,” or the words “cease to be wrong.”

Print before the internet. A phrase search of the Library of Congress Chronicling America ↗ newspaper corpus returns no match for the phrase. Wikisource’s full-text index returns none either.

The specialists. Quote Investigator has published nothing on this line — its own site search for “cease to be wrong” returns “Nothing Found.” So there is no expert finding to defer to here, and none to contradict.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Justice Character

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.

A Confession — complete Maude translationen.wikisource.org

Aylmer Maude's translation of Tolstoy's A Confession, all sixteen chapters, free to search yourself.
A Confession and What I Believe (Maude, Oxford, 1921)archive.org

Scanned World's Classics edition, translated by Aylmer Maude. Full text searchable; the phrase is not in it.
My Confession, My Religion, The Gospel in Brief (Crowell, 1899)archive.org

An independent, earlier English translation of the same book. Also does not contain the phrase.
Wikiquote — Leo Tolstoyen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced Tolstoy page, with a dedicated Confession (1882) section. This line does not appear on it.
Wikiquote — Relativismen.wikiquote.org

The one Wikiquote page that does carry the line, credited to "Leo Tolstoy, A Confession" with no edition, translator or page.
Quote Investigator — "If Fifty Million People Say a Foolish Thing…"quoteinvestigator.com

QI's investigation of the nearest documented maxim, which it traces back to Oliver Goldsmith in 1766 — and which it declines to credit to Anatole France or Bertrand Russell.

The name on the quote

Leo Tolstoy — the name attached, not the source

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Russian novelist and Christian-anarchist moralist

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910) wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then spent his last three decades on religious and moral prose that attacked church, state and property alike. That second career — A Confession, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the anti-war essays — is why moral one-liners drift onto his name so easily: he really did spend thirty years arguing that conscience outranks custom. He is listed here as the misattributed name, not as the author of this sentence — the wording does not appear in his work.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this finding

No documented source. The wording appears in none of Tolstoy’s works in English translation, including both Aylmer Maude’s translation (Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and What I Believe, London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1921) and the Thomas Y. Crowell edition (Leo Tolstoy, My Confession, My Religion, The Gospel in Brief, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899) of A Confession, the book named in every popular citation.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/wrong-does-not-cease-to-be-wrong-because-the-majority-share/

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