“Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
I first encountered a version of this quote during one of the most frustrating conversations of my adult life. My uncle and I sat across from each other at a kitchen table, deep into an argument that had been circling for two hours without moving an inch. He kept restating his position with growing confidence, adding new words but never new ideas. Afterward, a friend texted me this quote with zero context — just the words, nothing else. It landed like a cold glass of water to the face. Suddenly, I realized I had been doing the exact same thing as my uncle. Neither of us had been thinking. We had both been shuffling the same mental deck, over and over, convinced we were playing new cards.
That moment cracked something open. I started wondering: who actually said this? Where did it come from? The answer, it turns out, is far more complicated — and far more interesting — than the famous names usually attached to it.
The Quote You’ve Seen Misattributed Everywhere
If you’ve seen this quote online, you’ve almost certainly seen it credited to William James, Edward R. Murrow, or Knute Rockne. These are compelling names. James was one of the most towering intellects in American psychology and philosophy. Murrow was the gold standard of broadcast journalism. Rockne was a cultural icon of competitive grit. Any one of them could have said something this sharp. However, the historical record tells a different story — and tracing that story reveals how quotes travel, mutate, and acquire famous faces along the way.
The earliest confirmed attribution points to a far less famous figure: Bishop William Fitzjames Oldham, a Methodist Episcopal missionary and clergyman. Additionally, a cluster of earlier linguistic building blocks suggests the idea had been quietly forming in American thought for decades before Oldham ever voiced it.
A Humorist Plants the Seed in 1874
Before anyone formally coined the famous line, the concept was already bubbling up in American popular culture. In 1874, a bestselling humor compilation titled Everybody’s Friend, Or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor included a striking precursor.
Josh Billings was the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw, a wildly popular humorist of the era. Shaw wrote in heavy dialect spelling, which was part of his comedic brand. His observation — that people don’t eliminate prejudices through education, they simply refine them — planted a seed. It wasn’t the full quote yet. However, it pointed directly at the same uncomfortable truth.
Then, in 1898, a California newspaper editorial used the phrase “rearrange their prejudices” in a completely different context. The editorial argued that European nations needed to reassess America’s growing power after the Spanish-American War. Therefore, the specific vocabulary of “rearranging prejudices” was already circulating in print before any single person crystallized it into the famous epigram.
Bishop Oldham: The Most Likely Originator
The first clear, direct attribution of the core idea to a named individual appears in Zion’s Herald in 1906. The publication described Bishop Oldham scoring with his audience using a “bon mot” — a witty remark — to the effect that some people “think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
Who was this bishop? William Fitzjames Oldham served in the Methodist Episcopal Church and carried out missionary work across multiple continents. He was a gifted public speaker, known for precisely the kind of sharp, memorable phrasing that audiences remember and repeat. His name appears in Zion’s Herald as early as 1904, confirming his identity and his prominence within his religious community.
The 1906 attribution is currently the earliest documented instance of the complete idea expressed in closely matching language. Consequently, current evidence points to Oldham as the most probable originator — though that conclusion remains tentative, as earlier sources may yet surface.
William James Writes Something Adjacent
In 1907, William James published Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, a landmark collection of philosophical lectures. Lecture Five contained a genuinely striking passage about how minds grow in “spots” and resist new information:
“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.”
This passage is thematically brilliant and clearly related to the famous epigram. However, it is not the same statement. James describes the mechanism of belief-preservation beautifully. He does not deliver the crisp, sardonic one-liner that later circulated under his name. The connection is real but circumstantial. James died in 1910, and his name didn’t attach to this specific quote until 1946 — nearly four decades after Pragmatism appeared.
The Quote Spreads Through American Print
Between 1911 and 1926, the saying appeared repeatedly in American newspapers, each time in slightly different form and with varying attributions. This pattern is completely typical of how memorable phrases travel in the pre-internet era. They hop from sermon to column to editorial, accumulating new versions along the way.
In 1911, the Los Angeles Times printed a column by William T. Ellis that included the saying attributed to a “clever preacher.” The column also ran in The Charlotte News, which demonstrates how widely newspaper syndication spread these ideas. The 1911 version reads:
“You think you are thinking, when really you are only rearranging your prejudices.”
By 1913, a Buffalo newspaper printed it with no attribution at all. “It has been said by someone” — that anonymous framing tells us the quote had already lost its original owner. Consequently, it had entered the commons of popular wisdom.
In 1922, the saying appeared in The Appeal of Saint Paul, Minnesota, specifically to criticize William Jennings Bryan for his attacks on evolutionary theory. Reverend George Craig Stewart declared Bryan “a conspicuous example of the man who thinks he is thinking, but who is only rearranging his prejudices.” This shows the quote already functioning as a rhetorical weapon — a sharp instrument for calling out intellectual stubbornness.
Luther Burbank and Knute Rockne Enter the Picture
In January 1926, the eminent botanist Luther Burbank received credit for a delightful variant of the saying. Burbank’s version had a wry, almost gentle humor to it — suggesting that even rearranging prejudices occasionally was better than doing nothing at all. It’s a softer spin on the same core idea.
Then, in November 1926, Knute Rockne published a newspaper column warning against excessive partisanship among football fans. Crucially, Rockne placed the words in quotation marks and explicitly stated he had heard the remark — he did not claim authorship. His column began:
“Most men when they think they are thinking are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
Rockne used the quote as a launching pad for his actual argument about sports partisanship. However, within a year, a Honolulu newspaper attributed the line directly to Rockne. This is a textbook example of misattribution: a famous person quotes an existing saying, and the audience assumes he invented it.
William James and Edward R. Murrow Receive Credit Decades Later
The William James attribution appeared in print in 1946, more than three decades after his death. By then, the quote had been circulating anonymously and under various names for forty years. James was a natural candidate — his philosophical work genuinely engaged with prejudice and belief formation, and his intellectual stature made the attribution feel credible.
Edward R. Murrow received credit in a 1949 Illinois newspaper. Murrow was at the peak of his fame as a broadcaster. He may well have used the quote on air, having encountered it during its decades of circulation. However, using a quote is very different from originating it.
By 1989, the Congressional Research Service’s reference work Respectfully Quoted examined the James attribution and labeled it “Unverified.” That single word — unverified — is the honest verdict that the historical record still supports today.
Why Famous Names Attract Orphaned Quotes
This quote’s journey illustrates a phenomenon that researchers call “Churchillian drift” — the tendency for unattributed sayings to migrate toward the most famous person plausibly connected to them. Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein all collect quotes they never actually said, simply because their names lend weight and credibility.
In this case, three very different famous men — a philosopher, a journalist, and a football coach — each absorbed versions of a saying that a Methodist bishop most likely coined. The bishop’s name carried no cultural gravity outside his own community. Therefore, the quote drifted toward more recognizable faces.
Additionally, the quote’s content made it feel like something a great thinker would say. It’s self-aware, slightly cynical, and intellectually flattering to anyone who considers themselves a real thinker. That quality made it irresistible to attribute upward.
The Idea Itself: Why It Still Cuts Deep
Strip away the attribution debate entirely, and you’re left with an observation that feels uncomfortably accurate. Most of us, most of the time, do not genuinely revise our beliefs. Instead, we find new arrangements for the beliefs we already hold. We gather evidence selectively. We interpret ambiguous situations in ways that confirm what we already believe. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, and decades of research support its pervasive influence on human reasoning.
The quote’s power comes from its precision. It doesn’t say people are stupid. It doesn’t say they’re dishonest. It says they mistake a familiar mental activity — rearranging — for a demanding one: genuine thinking. That’s a far more subtle and devastating critique. Furthermore, it implicates everyone, including the person quoting it.
William James, even if he never said the famous line, understood this dynamic deeply. Source His work in pragmatism explored how people use new information as raw material that gets absorbed into existing frameworks rather than replacing them. His grease-spot metaphor captures the same uncomfortable truth: minds spread slowly, reluctantly, and always in the shape of what was already there.
Modern Relevance in an Age of Information Overload
If Bishop Oldham’s observation felt sharp in 1906, it feels almost prophetic today. Source We live in an era of unprecedented information access. Anyone can reach primary sources, expert analysis, and opposing viewpoints within seconds. However, research consistently shows that greater information access often reinforces existing beliefs rather than challenging them.
Social media algorithms amplify this effect. They learn what you already believe and serve you more of it. Additionally, the sheer volume of available information makes selective consumption easier than ever. You can build an entirely coherent-seeming worldview from sources that all agree with you. The rearrangement happens faster now, with better tools — but it’s still rearrangement.
The quote also carries a challenge that goes beyond criticism. It implicitly asks: what would real thinking look like? Real thinking involves genuine openness to being wrong. It means following an argument to a conclusion you didn’t predict. It requires sitting with discomfort when evidence contradicts your existing framework. That’s genuinely hard work, and most people — most of the time — avoid it.
Conclusion: Credit the Bishop, Respect the Idea
Based on the available historical evidence, William Fitzjames Oldham deserves credit as the most probable originator of this saying. Source His name may not carry the cultural weight of William James or Edward R. Murrow, but the historical record favors him. The attribution remains tentative — earlier sources could always emerge — but he holds the strongest documented claim.
More importantly, the idea itself deserves respect regardless of who coined it. It describes something real and persistent about human cognition. It survived more than a century of circulation precisely because it keeps proving itself true. Every generation encounters it and recognizes the behavior it describes — sometimes in others, sometimes, uncomfortably, in themselves.
Next time you’re deep in an argument and feel absolutely certain you’re thinking clearly, it might be worth pausing. Ask yourself honestly: am I following this thought somewhere new? Or am I just moving the same furniture around in a room I’ve lived in for years? The bishop asked that question in 1906. We’re still not done answering it.