Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie was an American writer and public-speaking teacher whose 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People became one of the most influential self-improvement books ever written. His first principle—“Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain”—is the setting for this aphorism, which is his own gloss on the idea. He often illustrated his points with historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, which is precisely how his lines came to be mistaken for theirs.