3 Quotes George Bernard Shaw Never Actually Said

George Bernard Shaw was witty, prolific, and quotable—which makes him catnip for misattribution. When you’re famous for saying clever things, people start crediting you with every clever thing they can’t quite place. I’ve traced hundreds of dubious quotes back to their sources, and Shaw’s name comes up again and again attached to words he never wrote.

What’s interesting about these three examples is how modern most of the false credits are. Shaw died in 1950, but two of these misattributions don’t appear until the 1990s and 2000s—decades after anyone who actually read Shaw could correct the record. The third is a case of mistaken identity so straightforward it’s almost funny. None of these quotes appear anywhere in Shaw’s published works, yet they circulate endlessly with his name attached. It’s a pattern I see constantly: a quote gets divorced from its actual source, floats around until it bumps into a famous name that sort of fits the tone, and then sticks there like a burr. Shaw’s reputation for sardonic wit made him an easy target. Here’s what actually happened with three of his most popular “quotes.”

“Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

This one gets credited to Shaw, Mark Twain, and Abraham Lincoln with equal confidence—which should be your first clue that nobody actually knows where it came from. The truth is, it’s an old American saying that’s been around since at least 1872, when a Pennsylvania newspaper printed a version about wrestling with hogs and getting spattered with filth. The modern wording was popularized in 1948 by Cyrus Ching, who ran federal labor mediation and credited it to an unnamed uncle in the Saturday Evening Post.

The false attributions came much later. Someone pinned it on Twain by 1963 in a Montana newspaper letter. Shaw got tagged in 1994 on Usenet. Lincoln picked it up in 1996. None of them ever said it. I checked their works—it’s nowhere. It’s just an anonymous folk wisdom that people kept trying to give a famous father, and Shaw happened to have the right caustic tone to make it plausible.

“The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute”

People love this one because it sounds like the kind of epigrammatic reversal Shaw was famous for. But he didn’t write it. The idea originated with W. H. H. MacKellar in The Rotarian magazine in May 1939, though his version was wordier: “Optimism designed a ship to sail daringly into the skies—and fall perhaps at times. So pessimism designed the parachute.” The snappy modern phrasing got credited to humorist Gil Stern by 1967 in the Chicago Tribune.

So how did Shaw’s name get attached? Almost certainly through confusion. By 2007, quote collections were crediting “G.B. Stern”—the British novelist Gladys Bronwyn Stern. Someone probably saw “G.B.” and thought “George Bernard.” Shaw himself didn’t get the full false credit until 2015 in The Jerusalem Post. It’s a comedy of errors: Gil Stern became G.B. Stern became George Bernard Shaw, each step making the quote sound more authoritative while getting further from the truth.

“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”

This is my favorite kind of misattribution: the kind with an obvious paper trail that everyone ignores. The quote comes from Josh Billings, the pen name of nineteenth-century humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw. He published it in February 1872 in his trademark phonetic spelling: “Success don’t konsist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one the seckond time.” It was collected in his 1874 book Everybody’s Friend.

Henry Wheeler Shaw. H.W. Shaw. You see where this is going, right? Sometime in the internet era, quote websites started crediting “George Bernard Shaw,” almost certainly because someone saw the byline “H.W. Shaw” and assumed it was the more famous Shaw. Never mind that they lived in different countries and different centuries. Never mind that Josh Billings was a well-known humorist in his own right. The names were close enough, and George Bernard Shaw was more recognizable, so the quote migrated to the bigger name. That’s all it took.

What strikes me about all three of these is how little friction there is between a quote and the wrong author. An anonymous saying, a case of initials, a byline from 1872—none of it matters once a famous name gets attached. The false credits are all recent, mostly from the internet age, when quotes spread faster than anyone can verify them. Two came decades after Shaw died, when there was nobody left who’d say, “Wait, I read all his plays—that’s not him.”

If you see a quote that sounds almost too perfectly like someone, especially if it’s Shaw or Twain or Einstein, that’s your cue to be skeptical. The wittier and more shareable it is, the more likely it’s been passed around until the real source wore off. Check it yourself. You might find a labor mediator’s uncle, a nineteenth-century humorist with an unfortunate name, or just an old piece of folk wisdom that nobody famous ever said at all.

Browse more of George Bernard Shaw’s quotes — real and otherwise — in the full George Bernard Shaw collection.