Stephen Leacock

Stephen Leacock taught political economy at McGill University and was, for a stretch of the 1910s and 1920s, the most widely read humorist in the English-speaking world. In his essay Simple Stories of Success, or How to Succeed in Life he takes the persistence proverb apart and rewrites it: the old motto, he says, “ought to read, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit, at once.’” He did not write the wording on this page — Quote Investigator names him as the precursor, the joke the 1940s quip appears to have evolved from, not its author.