Never say die.CHARLES DICKENS
This saying—which urges people to never give up, never give in, or never give up hope—was already popular in 1849, when it made an appearance in the Charles Dickens novel Barnaby Rudge (it also later showed up in several other works by Dickens). It went on to become one of history’s most famous sayings, serving as the title of four Hollywood films, over two dozen books, and at least a half-dozen songs (from such disparate artists as Waylon Jennings, Black Sabbath, and Bon Jovi), and the name of one thoroughbred racehorse.
Never take anything for granted.BENJAMIN DISRAELI
English politician and prime minister Benjamin Disraeli may not be the first person in history to offer this famous admonition, but he inserted the words into an 1864 speech.
Never complain, never explain.BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Disraeli used this saying on many occasions in the mid–1800s, and it is often described as his motto. It has been adopted by hundreds—perhaps thousands—of others, often verbatim, and sometimes with minor tweaks. In 1943, Stanley Baldwin, another former English prime minister, was quoted as saying:
You will find in politics that
you are much exposed to the attribution of false motives.
Never complain and never explain.
The saying is often associated with Henry Ford II, the grandson of Henry Ford. In 1974, while serving as chairman of the board of the Ford Motor Company, the fifty-seven-year-old Ford was arrested for drunk driving in Santa Barbara, California. The arrest was widely reported because it included one potentially salacious detail—at the time of his arrest, the married Ford was accompanied by thirty-five-year-old Kathleen DuRoss, a woman who was believed to be his mistress (a few years later, when Ford split with second wife Cristina, she became Ford’s third wife). Ford was ultimately convicted of the offense and given two years’ probation. As he was leaving the courthouse after the sentencing, he was greeted by a mob of reporters. When asked to comment, he said only four words: “Never complain, never explain.” The phrase became so popularly associated with Ford that Victor Lasky’s 1981 biography of Ford was titled Never Complain, Never Explain: The Story of Henry Ford II. The original line was Disraeli’s, though, and over the years it inspired many similar observations. You’ll find a number of them in later chapters, but here are three more:
Never contradict. Never explain. Never apologize.
(Those are the secrets of a happy life).JOHN ARBUTHNOT FISHER
Never explain—your friends do not need it
and your enemies will not believe you anyway.ELBERT HUBBARD, in The Motto Book (1907)
Never apologize and never explain—it’s a sign of weakness.JOHN WAYNE, in the 1949 film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.ROBERT J. HANLON
This now-classic line made its first appearance in print in Murphy’s Law, Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong, Arthur Bloch’s 1980 sequel to his first Murphy’s Law book, published a few years earlier. The observation was simply described as “Hanlon’s Razor,” and for many years, people thought Hanlon was a fictional creation of Bloch’s. After all, the observation bears a close resemblance to a famous line from Robert Heinlein’s 1941 sci-fi story “Logic of Empire”: “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”
But there was a very real person behind the quotation, and after discussing it with Hanlon’s widow, Regina, and his son, Robert, I’m happy to tell the story here. For many years, Robert J. Hanlon was a computer programmer at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After reading the first Murphy’s Law book, he decided to accept the publisher’s invitation for readers to submit “laws” of their own creation for a planned sequel. Several months after submitting his creation, he was delighted to learn that his never attribute to malice creation would be appearing in the book. As a “prize” for his selection, Hanlon ultimately received ten copies of the sequel when it was published in 1980, and there are some friends and family members who still treasure the copies that Hanlon autographed for them. Hanlon was deeply interested in poetry and literature, and would often amaze people with his ability to recite extensive passages from Shakespeare’s works completely from memory. But did he ever read Robert Heinlein’s “Logic of Empire”? That we will never know.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing;
it wastes your time and annoys the pig.ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
This line, which first appeared in Heinlein’s 1973 sci-fi classic Time Enough for Love, was delivered by the character Lazarus Long, an earthling who was born in a selective-breeding experiment, raised on distant planets, and able to live for several centuries (he first appeared in Heinlein’s 1941 novel Methuselah’s Children). Long, who appeared in five Heinlein novels, is one of the genre’s most enduring characters, and this observation appears at the conclusion of a remarkable passage. In a conversation with a friend about dealing with greedy people, he says:I have never swindled a man. At most I keep quiet and let him swindle himself. This does no harm, as a fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from the experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Shortly after Time Enough for Love was published, this admonition began to enjoy great popularity. And while Heinlein clearly was the original author of the saying about never teaching pigs to sing, I now believe he may have been inspired by an even earlier observation about pigs—and one that has nothing to do with singing:
Never wrestle with a pig;
you’ll get dirty, and only the pig enjoys it.
This warning about getting dragged into the mud during a dispute with a disagreeable or obnoxious person emerged during World War II, but it began to show up with far greater frequency after it was mentioned in a 1950 Time magazine profile of Cyrus Ching. After decades of work as a labor-management arbitrator and dispute mediator, the seventy-four-year-old Ching had just been named by President Truman to head up a new government agency called the Wage Stabilization Board. When the plain-speaking Ching was asked how he felt about the criticism he was likely to be getting for taking on the thankless responsibility of stabilizing wages, he replied: “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and besides the pig likes it.”
Never tell tales out of school.LEMUEL HOPKINS, in a 1786 issue of The Anarchiad
The phrase “telling tales out of school” first appeared in William Tyndale’s 1530 book Practice of Prelates. In the 1600s, an English proverb emerged that extended the concept: “You must not tell tales out of the tavern.” Hopkins, though, was one of the first—if not the first—to use the neveristic version. The saying is often used to chastise someone who has revealed a secret or passed along information that was better left unsaid.
