Earliest named source of the modern wording · Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes, 1997
C. Archie Danielson is the name on the earliest named printing of the exact modern wording, in Reader’s Digest Quotable Quotes (1997) — but virtually nothing is documented about the person, and an anonymous simile variant (“like a bird without wings”) predates it by a year (1996), so even this credit is uncertain. The clearest documented ancestor of the thought is a 1908 line by Sherwin-Williams executive Walter H. Cottingham (1866–1930), then vice-president and general manager and later the company’s president: “A man without ambition is like a bird without wings” — about ambition, with no mention of intelligence. Salvador Dalí, who died in 1989, is not linked to the saying in any of his own writings or interviews.