Everybody gets the quote wrong.
Way back when I was a very young lawyer I attended a Motion Hearing with a Senior Partner, who pointed out in support of his argument that the opposing counsel already agreed with him: they had in fact adopted exactly the same position for which he was advocating just a few months previously in a different case. Senior Partner had the legal briefs opposing counsel had filed – with their signatures on those briefs – to prove it.
But now they found it advantageous to argue the opposite position and – incredibly – they won the hearing.
Afterward, talking with opposing counsel while waiting for the elevator, Senior Partner asked them how they could so cynically argue diametrically opposing positions within only a few months’ time. The other side smiled superciliously and said: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Senior Partner had never heard this expression before, correctly perceived it to be an insult, and railed afterward in the car about how it was just further proof that the other side were a bunch of ethically challenged shysters who didn’t really believe a single goddamned word that came out of their mouths.
Had I been a little older, and thus a little more sure of myself, I might have piped up at the elevators to correct those guys. What Ralph Waldo Emerson actually said was: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
That initial two word qualifier – “a foolish” – makes all the difference.
