“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think they’ll hate you.”
— Don Marquis, The Sun Dial column, *The
Evening Sun*
I first encountered this quote during one of the strangest weeks of my professional life. I had just delivered what I thought was a genuinely challenging presentation — the kind that pushed back on comfortable assumptions and asked hard questions. My manager pulled me aside afterward, not to congratulate me, but to suggest I had “made people uncomfortable.” That evening, a friend texted me a single line with no context: ”If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think they’ll hate you.” I stared at my phone for a long time. It wasn’t comfort exactly — it was more like recognition, the strange relief of discovering that someone had already mapped the territory you’re standing in. The quote didn’t soften the sting, but it reframed it completely, and I’ve never forgotten that moment.
That experience sent me down a long rabbit hole. Who actually said this? When? And why does it still feel so precise, so uncomfortably accurate, nearly a century after it first appeared in print?
The Quote Itself
Before diving into origins, it helps to sit with the quote for a moment. The statement operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it describes audience psychology — people enjoy the feeling of thinking without the discomfort of actually doing it. Beneath that surface, however, it delivers a sharp critique of intellectual performance versus genuine intellectual challenge. The quote captures this human tendency with devastating economy. Two sentences. One devastating truth.
The Leading Candidate: Don Marquis
The name most consistently attached to this saying is Donald Robert Perry Marquis, better known simply as Don Marquis. He worked for several major publications throughout his career, but his most famous platform was a column called “The Sun Dial” in The Evening Sun of New York. That column ran for years and became a cultural institution, beloved for its wit, its philosophical asides, and its remarkable cast of recurring characters.
Marquis created Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat — two of American literary journalism’s most enduring fictional figures. Through Archy, a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach who typed by diving headfirst onto typewriter keys, Marquis explored ideas about art, ambition, mortality, and the absurdity of human pretension. The voice was comic, but the ideas were serious. That combination — humor as a vehicle for genuine thought — makes the quote feel entirely consistent with everything else Marquis produced.
The Earliest Known Appearance in Print
The earliest documented instance of this saying in print dates to February 1923. In that column, Morley attributed the remark to his friend Don Marquis — though he did so with a characteristic playful hedge, wondering aloud whether it might actually have come from the fifth-century Gallo-Roman poet Apollinaris Sidonius. That parenthetical joke almost certainly signals that Morley was being deliberately absurd, anchoring a modern wisecrack to an ancient name for comic effect.
Morely wrote:
As Mr. Don Marquis once wrote (or was it Apollinaris Sidonius?) “If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
This citation is critically important. It establishes that the saying was already in circulation by early 1923, and that at least one well-connected literary figure of the era — Morley himself — believed Marquis had coined it. However, the phrase “once wrote” suggests that Morley had encountered it in print previously, likely in one of Marquis’s Evening Sun columns. Until those archives become more accessible, the exact date of the original publication remains unknown.
A Precursor from 1901
Interestingly, a related idea appeared in print more than two decades before the Morley citation. The joke ran as follows:
“It is your aim, of course,” said his intimate friend, “to make people think.”
“No,” replied the popular lecturer, in a burst of confidence, “my business is to make people think they think — or, rather, to make them think I think they think.”
This earlier version doesn’t carry the same sharp contrast between flattery and genuine challenge. Instead, it plays the idea for pure comedy, mocking the self-awareness of a lecturer who knows his real job is performance rather than enlightenment. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the underlying concept — the distinction between the feeling of thinking and actual thinking — was already circulating in American cultural discourse by the turn of the twentieth century. Marquis may have sharpened and crystallized an idea already floating in the air.
Christopher Morley Keeps Spreading It
Christopher Morley didn’t just mention the quote once. He returned to it repeatedly, which suggests it genuinely resonated with him. In 1924, Morley published a slim volume titled Religio Journalistici, a collection of reflections on journalism and writing. In that book, Morley quoted Marquis again, this time with slightly different phrasing:
Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter! What was it Mr. Don Marquis has remarked: “If you make people think they think, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
Notice the small but meaningful difference: “think they think” instead of “think they are thinking.” The phrasing shifts slightly between appearances, which is entirely typical of how witty sayings travel through oral and written culture before settling into a fixed form. Additionally, a reviewer of Religio Journalistici in a Camden, New Jersey newspaper singled out this particular Marquis quote as the book’s single most brilliant thought — remarkable praise given that the reviewer was technically critiquing Morley’s own writing.
The Phrasing Evolves Over Time
One of the most fascinating aspects of this quote’s history is how its exact wording shifted across different publications and decades. By 1926, when Morley served as chairman of a book week event at Wanamaker’s department store in Manhattan, he quoted Marquis again in yet another variant:
‘If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you; if you make them really think, they will hate you.’
Then in 1932, the widely syndicated gossip columnist O. O. McIntyre published his own version, attributing it to Marquis and framing it as a recipe for successful newspaper paragraph writing:
“Make people think they think and they’ll love you. Really make them think and they’ll hate you.”
McIntyre’s version strips the quote to its barest bones — no “they’re” or “they are,” just the raw logical structure. The meaning survives every variation, which speaks to the underlying idea’s resilience.
The Roscoe B. Ellard Misattribution
By 1935, the quote had traveled far enough from its origins that it began acquiring new names. The magazine printed:
“If you make people think that they think, they will love you; but if you really make them think, they will hate you.” — Prof. Roscoe B. Ellard, Journalism, Univ. of Mo.
This is a textbook example of how quotes migrate. Ellard almost certainly used the line — perhaps in a lecture or a speech — and someone in the audience attributed it to him without knowing its earlier history. Therefore, a quote that had been circulating with Marquis’s name attached for over a decade suddenly appeared under a completely different name. This kind of attribution drift happens constantly with popular sayings.
Bartlett’s Quotations Weighs In
The 1938 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gave the saying its most prestigious early endorsement. The entry read:
DONALD ROBERT PERRY MARQUIS [1878-1937]
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think they’ll hate you.
The Sun Dial
The fact that Morley himself edited this edition of Bartlett’s is significant. He had personal knowledge of the attribution, having credited Marquis publicly since 1923. His editorial decision to include it under Marquis’s name carries real weight. However, Bartlett’s did not provide a specific date or issue number for the Evening Sun column, which means the entry rests on Morley’s memory and conviction rather than a verified archival source.
The “Archy and Mehitabel” Confusion
A 1997 entry in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations created a new layer of confusion by attributing the quote to Marquis’s 1927 book archy and mehitabel. This appears to be an error — the quote simply doesn’t appear in that book. The misattribution likely happened because archy and mehitabel is the most famous and widely available collection of Marquis’s work, making it a convenient (if inaccurate) citation target.
This pattern — attributing a quote to a writer’s most famous work rather than to the actual obscure source — is extremely common in quotation dictionaries. It’s a kind of editorial shorthand that unfortunately muddies the historical record.
Who Was Don Marquis, Really?
Understanding the quote fully requires understanding the man behind it. Don Marquis was not simply a witty newspaper columnist. He was a deeply philosophical writer who used humor as a delivery mechanism for uncomfortable truths.
Marquis occupied a peculiar position in American letters — too literary for pure journalism, too journalistic for the literary establishment. He wrote plays, poetry, novels, and short stories alongside his columns. His humor consistently carried a melancholic undertow. The cockroach Archy, who could only type lowercase letters because he couldn’t hold down the shift key, wrote free verse about the futility of artistic ambition and the indifference of the universe. That’s not standard newspaper fare.
The quote about thinking fits perfectly within this worldview. Marquis understood, from years of writing for mass audiences, that genuine intellectual challenge is rarely rewarded. Audiences want the performance of depth, not depth itself. They want to feel smart, not to be made to feel uncertain. Marquis had lived that reality in his columns for years. The quote reads less like an abstract observation and more like hard-won professional wisdom.
Why the Quote Keeps Circulating
More than a century after it first appeared in print, this saying continues to spread across social media, business books, and academic discussions. Its longevity reflects something real about human psychology and social dynamics. Additionally, the quote applies to an astonishing range of contexts — teaching, management, politics, media, advertising, and interpersonal communication.
In educational settings, teachers frequently discover that students reward engaging performance over genuine challenge. In politics, leaders who validate existing fears and beliefs consistently outperform those who demand more complex thinking from their constituents. In media, content that confirms what audiences already believe generates more engagement than content that genuinely challenges them.
The quote, in other words, describes a structural feature of human social life — not a bug, but a deeply embedded feature. That’s why it keeps returning.
The Variations and What They Tell Us
The multiple phrasings that have circulated over the decades are worth examining as a group. Some versions say “think they’re thinking.” Others say “think they think” or “think they are thinking.” Some include “but” as a connector; others use a semicolon or simply a period. The second sentence sometimes reads “if you really make them think” and sometimes “if you make them really think.”
None of these variations change the fundamental meaning. However, the version that Bartlett’s standardized — “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think they’ll hate you” — has become the dominant form in contemporary usage. The Bartlett’s effect essentially froze one version of the quote while the others faded.
The Broader Intellectual Tradition
Marquis didn’t invent the underlying idea from nothing. The tension between flattery and genuine challenge runs through centuries of Western thought. Socrates famously made people uncomfortable by asking questions that exposed the limits of their knowledge — and the Athenians eventually executed him for it. That’s perhaps the most dramatic historical illustration of the quote’s thesis.
Similarly, Machiavelli observed that princes who tell people what they want to hear maintain power more easily than those who insist on hard truths. The specific formulation Marquis created, however, belongs to the twentieth century — to the age of mass media, mass education, and the professional communicator. It describes the particular situation of someone whose job is to reach large audiences through words.
Modern Usage and Misattribution
Today, the quote circulates widely on social media, often without any attribution at all. Source When attribution appears, it usually points to Don Marquis — though occasionally the quote gets assigned to Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, or George Carlin, all of whom serve as default repositories for unverified witty sayings.
The Wilde misattribution is particularly understandable. The quote has a Wildean quality — the elegant paradox, the surface playfulness concealing a sharp critique. However, no evidence connects Wilde to this saying, and the documented trail leads clearly back to Marquis and the early 1920s.
What the Quote Gets Right — and Where It Gets Complicated
The quote’s power comes partly from its cynicism, but that cynicism deserves some scrutiny. The framing implies a kind of fatalism — as if genuine thinkers are doomed to be resented, and as if audiences are permanently incapable of genuine engagement. Real intellectual history suggests a more complicated picture.
Some genuinely challenging thinkers have achieved enormous popular success. Source Some ideas that initially provoked hostility eventually became mainstream. Therefore, the quote captures a real tendency without telling the whole story. It describes the short-term social dynamics of intellectual challenge more accurately than it describes long-term outcomes.
Additionally, the quote assumes a relatively passive audience — people who react rather than engage. In practice, audiences vary enormously. Some genuinely seek challenge. Some communities actively reward difficult thinking. The quote describes a common pattern, not an iron law.
Conclusion: A Century-Old Truth That Still Stings
The most likely origin story runs like this: Don Marquis, Source writing his “Sun Dial” column for The Evening Sun at some point before February 1923, crafted this observation from his years of experience writing for mass audiences. His friend Christopher Morley encountered it, loved it, and quoted it publicly in 1923 — giving us our earliest documented appearance. From there, the saying spread through literary circles, journalism, and eventually into the broader culture, accumulating variant phrasings and occasional misattributions along the way.
The 1938 Bartlett’s entry, edited by Morley himself, effectively canonized both the attribution and the phrasing. That canonization has largely held. Most serious reference sources today credit Marquis, even if the precise original column remains unlocated.
What makes the quote remarkable isn’t its cleverness — though it is genuinely clever. What makes it remarkable is its durability. It describes something true about human psychology that hasn’t changed in a hundred years, and probably won’t change in the next hundred. The person in any room who makes everyone feel smart and validated will leave beloved. The person who actually challenges everyone’s assumptions will leave the room alone.
Marquis knew that. He wrote it down. And somehow, despite everything the quote predicts about how genuine thinking gets received, the quote itself has been loved for a century. Perhaps that’s the real irony — a thought about the rejection of real thinking has itself become one of the most accepted thoughts in American cultural memory.