popular refrains - "Best is enemy of the good" (Russian idiom/saying)


What are English equivalents for following Russian idiom: "best is enemy of the good"? In Russian it means that if you are going too much after perfection you may make things even worse instead of achieving of something good.



Answer



This is attributed to Voltaire as ‘Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien’, and occurs in English as 'The best is the enemy of the good.'


However, there appears to be a preference for ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’ in American English. Of the 36 records of ‘the enemy of the good’ in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 22 are preceded by ‘the perfect’ (and, in one instance, ‘perfection’). 10 are preceded by ‘the best’ and 4 by ‘the better’. All four records in the British National Corpus are preceded by ‘the best’. It may be that the expression arose independently in the United States, but that in the UK it was a conscious translation of the French.


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