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Short answer: there is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain ever said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Neither man has ever been found writing it or saying it. The earliest printing anyone has located is from 1906, and it is not solemn advice at all. It is a joke. It was printed in a small book of silly nursery rhymes, directly underneath a comic verse about a man who said exactly the wrong thing to a woman on the street.
If you have shared it with Lincoln’s name on it, so has nearly everyone. It is on classroom walls and office mugs and a few million social posts. Here is where it actually came from, which turns out to be a much better story.
Who really said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool”?
The careful research on this one comes from Quote Investigator, a site that tracks sayings back through old books and newspapers. The earliest appearance it has found is in a book called Mrs. Goose, Her Book, by a writer named Maurice Switzer. It was published in New York by Moffat, Yard & Company, with a copyright notice of 1906 and a publication date of 1907. The line sits on page 29.
You can read that book yourself. A scanned copy from the University of California Libraries is free online at the Internet Archive, and the sentence is right there, worded slightly differently from the version we say today:
“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book, 1906
Read that twice, because the original is sharper than the version we inherited. Switzer wrote “at the risk of being thought a fool” – you might be one, you might not, nobody knows yet. And he ended with “remove all doubt of it.” Those two small words are the whole punchline, and the modern version drops them.
The book it came from is not a book of wisdom
This is the part almost nobody knows. Mrs. Goose, Her Book is a book of comic rewrites of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, aimed at adults in 1907 and poking fun at the America of its day – stock swindles, coal prices, crooked directors, the price of ice in summer.
Between the rhymes, Switzer printed one-line mock morals. That is what our famous sentence is. It is a punchline, placed under a short verse about a woman who drops her belt in the street and a man who blurts out the worst possible thing about it.
And here is the running joke of the whole book: those one-liners are famous proverbs, bent one notch out of shape. On the surrounding pages you will find “A fool and his opinions are soon parted,” which is the old line about a fool and his money. You will find “Fools rush in where angels fear to wed,” which is Alexander Pope’s line from 1711 with one word changed. And you will find “A soft answer encourageth another touch,” which is a straight lift from Proverbs 15:1, “A soft answer turneth away wrath.”
So the sentence we quote as grave wisdom was made in a workshop for bending proverbs. Which raises a fair question about which proverb it was bent from. We will come back to that.
How Lincoln and Twain got the credit
Once a line is funny and short, it starts collecting owners. Quote Investigator found the saying credited over the years to someone writing as “Empeco” in a Duluth newspaper in 1922, to a Dr. Arthur Burns in the Seattle Daily Times in 1924, and jokingly to Confucius in 1938.
Abraham Lincoln’s name first shows up in Golden Book Magazine in November 1931. Lincoln died in 1865. That is sixty-six years of silence before anyone thought to put it in his mouth.
Mark Twain came later still. The earliest Twain credit Quote Investigator located is in a Canadian newspaper, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, on 29 May 1953 – and even there the columnist hedged, writing “Maybe Mark Twain had something when he said.” Twain had been dead for forty-three years.
That hedge is worth noticing. The people closest to the saying were already unsure who owned it. “Maybe” hardened into “Mark Twain said” somewhere between 1953 and your phone screen, and nobody decided to do that. It just happens. A sentence sounds settled when a famous name is standing behind it, and the bigger name wins every time the line gets passed along. The same thing happened to “Comparison is the thief of joy,” which Theodore Roosevelt never said either.
One honest caution. Saying “there is no evidence” is not the same as saying “definitely not.” Lincoln and Twain both talked for a living, and plenty of what they said was never written down. What we can say is firm enough: no researcher has found either man saying it, and the credits only begin decades after both were buried. Even Switzer is the best candidate rather than a proven author. He may have written it first, or he may have been passing on a joke that was already going around the newspaper offices.
The idea is far older than 1906
Now back to that question. If Switzer’s whole method was bending an old proverb, which old proverb is this one bent from?
There is one that fits almost exactly, and it is about three thousand years older than Mrs. Goose:
“Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.”
Proverbs 17:28 (KJV)
That is the same joke. A fool, keeping quiet, getting away with it. Proverbs got there first, and Proverbs is being wry about it on purpose – “counted wise,” “esteemed,” not actually wise, just taken for it.
To be fair, nobody can prove Switzer was thinking of that verse. We have no note from him saying so. But a book that bends Pope and bends Proverbs 15:1 on the facing pages is a book where that would be entirely in character.
What matters more is what happens next in the old text, because this is where the ancient version goes somewhere the modern one never does. Proverbs 17:28 is the second half of a pair. Here is the verse immediately before it:
“He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.”
Proverbs 17:27 (KJV)
Put the two together and you have the full thought. Verse 27 is about the person who actually knows something and uses few words anyway. Verse 28 is the joke that follows it: and the fool who copies that habit gets mistaken for the first man.
So the ancient text makes the same joke, and then does something the famous one-liner never attempts. It sets the joke next to the real thing, so you can see the difference between them.
Why the difference is not just trivia
Look at what the modern saying actually advises. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” is about managing how you look. Its whole concern is the gap between what people suspect about you and what they can prove. It is good, cynical, 1906 newspaper humour, and it was never trying to be more than that.
Proverbs 17:27 is after something else. The quiet there is not a cover story. It comes from having knowledge, not from hiding the lack of it. One is a tactic for the nervous. The other is a description of someone who has nothing to hide and therefore nothing to prove.
That difference shows up in real rooms. Plenty of people stay quiet in meetings, or at the family table, or in a new church, specifically because of the Lincoln version – say nothing and nobody can confirm what they fear about you. That is an exhausting way to sit in a room, and it is not what the older line is recommending. If you tend to go the other way and fill the silence instead, we wrote about why nerves make us talk too much, and that verse is in there too.
Nothing here makes the joke worse. It is a genuinely good joke, and a book of 1907 nursery-rhyme parodies is a far more charming place for it to have come from than a presidential speech. It just was not Lincoln, and it was never the last word on silence. The last word was already three thousand years old by the time Switzer got hold of it.
Sayings drift like this all the time, in both directions. Some pick up a famous name they never had. Others get taken for scripture when they are not – “hate the sin, love the sinner” is one of those. Either way, finding out is a small pleasure, not an embarrassment.
Let’s talk
Which saying did you always assume was scripture, or always assumed came from someone famous, until you found out otherwise? Tell us in the comments – your answer might be the next one we dig into.
Questions people ask about “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool”
Did Abraham Lincoln say “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt”?
There is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” The line has never been found in his speeches, letters or writings. Quote Investigator traced the earliest credit to Lincoln to Golden Book Magazine in November 1931, which is sixty-six years after Lincoln died in 1865. The saying was already in print in 1906, before anyone attached his name to it.
Did Mark Twain say “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool”?
There is no evidence that Mark Twain said “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt,” in that wording or any other. The earliest credit to Twain that Quote Investigator found is in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix on 29 May 1953, forty-three years after Twain died, and even that columnist wrote only “Maybe Mark Twain had something when he said.” The saying has also been credited at various times to Confucius and to a Dr. Arthur Burns.
Who actually said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool”?
The earliest known printing of “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool” is by Maurice Switzer, in a humour book called Mrs. Goose, Her Book, copyright 1906 and published in 1907 by Moffat, Yard & Company of New York. His wording was “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.” Switzer is the leading candidate rather than a proven author, since he may have been repeating a joke already in circulation.
Is “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool” in the Bible?
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” is not in the Bible in those words, but the idea is, and it is far older. Proverbs 17:28 says, “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.” The verse before it, Proverbs 17:27, goes further than the modern saying ever does: “He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.”
What is Mrs. Goose, Her Book?
Mrs. Goose, Her Book is a 1907 book of comic rewrites of Mother Goose nursery rhymes by Maurice Switzer, satirising American life of the period. Between the rhymes it prints one-line mock morals, and “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it” is one of them. Several of those one-liners are famous proverbs twisted for a laugh, including “Fools rush in where angels fear to wed” and “A soft answer encourageth another touch.” A scanned copy is free to read at the Internet Archive.
Social Share Posts
- I had no idea: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” isn’t Lincoln and isn’t Twain. Earliest printing is 1906, in a book of comic nursery rhymes. Lincoln’s name got attached in 1931, 66 years after he died.
- Turns out the “better to remain silent” line was a punchline in a 1907 joke book, printed under a rhyme about a guy who said the wrong thing to a woman in the street. The whole book was built on bending famous proverbs one notch.
- Learned today that Proverbs 17:28 made the same joke about three thousand years earlier – “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise.” And then verse 27 does what the famous version never does.
