Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

This is a widely circulated English-language proverb, commonly invoked in everyday speech rather than traceable to a single author or definitive first publication. It reflects the spread of mechanical clocks as familiar household objects: a stopped (or “broken”) clock will still display the correct time at two moments in a 24-hour cycle. The saying is typically used in conversation, journalism, and political commentary to note that even an unreliable person, method, or source may occasionally produce a correct result. Because it functions as folk wisdom, it appears in many collections of proverbs and in varied phrasings across the 19th and 20th centuries.

The proverb cautions against equating occasional correctness with overall reliability. A “broken clock” can coincide with the truth by accident, not because it is dependable or well-calibrated. Applied to people, it suggests that someone habitually wrong may still make a valid point now and then; applied to systems, it warns that sporadic success does not prove soundness. The deeper implication is epistemic: we should evaluate claims on evidence and method, not on the speaker’s reputation alone—while also remembering that a single correct prediction does not redeem a consistently faulty framework.

1) “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
2) “A stopped clock is correct twice a day.”
3) “Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”