fl. 1863 · English Jesuit priest · recorded by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff
Almost nothing is documented about him beyond a single evening. On 21 September 1863, at the house of the Rev. C. K. Paul in Dorset, an English Jesuit whom the diarist names only as Father Strickland told Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff that a man may do an immense deal of good if he does not care who gets the credit for it. Grant Duff — a Liberal MP, later Governor of Madras, and a compulsive recorder of other people’s good lines — kept the sentence in his notebook for thirty-four years before publishing it, which is the only reason we have it at all. Quote Investigator identifies him as the key progenitor of the whole family of sayings that eventually reached Truman’s name.