their guns, Indy whips out his pistol and shoots both men. And as he does, he says to Mutt, “Nice try, kid, but it looks like you brought a knife to a gunfight.”
Below you will find a number of additional neverisms that are so widespread and so deeply embedded in popular culture that they deserve to be called classics:
Never speak ill of the dead.
Never sweat the small stuff.
Never judge by appearances.
Never take “no” for an answer.
Never mix business with pleasure.
Never throw good money after bad.
Never spend money before you have it.
Never answer a question before it’s asked.
Never believe everything you hear, and
believe only half of what you see.
In the remainder of the chapter, I’ll present more neverisms that have also achieved a classic status. You’ll find many familiar quotations in the pages to follow. If you have a favorite that doesn’t appear in this chapter, there’s a good chance it will show up in another place in the book.
Never give up. Never give in. Never give out.
If there were a Hall of Fame for admonitions, these three would be among the first to gain admittance. Each one is closely associated with Winston Churchill, who used all of them—and whose very life personified them. (For Churchill’s most famous use of never give in, see the beginning of the multiple neverisms chapter.)
The most celebrated of the three, though, would have to be never give up. It was already a fairly popular saying in the early 1800s, when it was adopted as a motto by Martin F. Tupper, a young Englishman studying at Oxford. In 1838, Tupper wrote Proverbial Philosophy, a book of inspirational prose and poetry. Over the next decade, in expanded and revised editions, it became one of England’s bestselling books. Often described as one of Queen Victoria’s favorite books, it contained Tupper’s most famous poem, “Never Give Up!” A stirring tribute to the traits of persistence and perseverance, especially when tested by adversity, the poem became hugely popular in Europe as well as in America, where it was often reproduced without mention of the author’s name (a common practice at the time). Here is the final stanza:Never give up! If adversity presses,Providence wisely has mingled the cup,And the best counsel, in all your distresses,Is the stout watchword of Never give up!
Few poets ever live to see international acclaim, but by 1850 Tupper was one of the world’s best-known poets. When he made his first visit to the United States in 1851, he was treated as a celebrity everywhere he went, and even feted at a White House dinner given in his honor by President Millard Fillmore.
The highlight of Tupper’s American trip was not the White House dinner, though, but his trip to Philadelphia. He visited all of the city’s major institutions, including the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. While on a tour of the facility given by hospital superintendent Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, Tupper noticed that copies of his “Never Give Up!” poem—but without his name—had been tacked to the door of every patient’s room. Tupper was honored, of course, and surmised that Dr. Kirkbride was simply paying tribute to his famous guest. Not so, it turns out. In fact, Dr. Kirkbride had no idea that the man he was escorting through the hospital had anything to do with the poem. It was one of the highlights of Tupper’s life, and one he eventually described in My Life as an Author (1886). Speaking about Dr. Kirkbride, he wrote in his memoirs:He had seen the verses, anonymous, in a newspaper, and judging them a good moral dose of hopefulness even for the half insane, placed them on every door to excellent effect. When to his astonishment he found the unknown author before him, greatly pleased, he asked if I would allow the patients to thank me; of course I complied, and soon was surrounded by kneeling and weeping and kissing folks, grateful for the good hope my verses had helped them to.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Many people believe this saying has its origins in the tale about the Greeks and their Trojan horse, but it really stems from the age-old practice of estimating a horse’s age by examining its teeth. As horses—and humans—age, their gums begin to recede, giving the impression of longer teeth (hence the expression, “getting long in the tooth”). For several thousand years, horse traders have used this method to determine the value of a horse. The gift horse proverb is about good manners. When you receive a gift, you should be grateful for your good fortune instead of attempting to determine its value.
The proverb goes back to at least the Roman Empire. When Saint Jerome was writing biblical commentary around A.D. 400, he suggested that the saying was already very well established. In his Commentary on Epistle to Ephesians, he wrote: “Do not, as the common proverb says, look at the teeth of a gift horse.” In 1546, when John Heywood put together the first major collection of proverbs in the English language, he presented it this way: “No man ought to look a given horse in the mouth.” In his 1710 book Proverbs, Samuel Palmer presented the first neveristic version—and the one that has survived: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Never change horses in midstream.
This famous warning about altering a course of action while in the process of carrying it out sometimes begins Never swap horses. While the original author is unknown, the person responsible for popularizing the sentiment is very well known. In an 1864 speech to the National Union League, Abraham Lincoln was speaking about the possibility of running for a second term as president when he said:I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that “it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”
Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.
This reminder about the value of seeing things from the perspective of others is often presented as a “Native American proverb,” and sometimes more specifically as an adage from the Sioux, Cherokee, or Nez Perce tribes. Never criticize is often used in place of never judge, and in some variations, the saying ends with until you have walked two moons in his moccasins. Almost all quotation researchers have concluded that this is not a genuine Native American saying, despite the common assertion. The underlying sentiment has also appeared in many other cultural traditions. In the Talmud, for example, Hillel advises, “Do not judge others until you stand in their place.”
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
In his Great Political Wit: Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House (1998), Bob Dole wrote that Bill Clinton considered this the best advice he got after becoming president. The admonition to avoid unnecessary disputes with newspaper publishers and journalists has been attributed to Ben Franklin, Mark Twain,
