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Who really said it

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason

Not J. P. Morgan’s wording — an older adage of unknown authorship Unknown Anonymous · precursor in print by 1872 · close match 1905 · credited to Morgan only from 1930
Disputed Free to reuse

No Morgan source exists — no letter, speech, testimony or contemporary report, and Morgan left no published writings. The earliest located Morgan credit is a single unsupported sentence in Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (1930) by Owen Wister, published seventeen years after Morgan died in 1913: “Pierpont Morgan once said: ‘A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.’” Wister gives no date, place, occasion or witness — and note that even he did not write the sentence people now circulate. Every later Morgan ascription in Quote Investigator’s chronology (1931, 1943, 1964) postdates Wister and adds no new evidence. A close match to the popular wording was already in print in February 1905, credited to nobody in particular, with a women-focused precursor going back to 1872 Quote Investigator ↗.

Last verified 30 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason” An adage of unknown authorship. A women-focused precursor is in print by 1872 (James Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit, p. 607, crediting an unnamed French author); a close match to the modern wording appeared in the Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, 11 February 1905, credited only to 'some wise person'. J. P. Morgan's name was first attached in 1930, seventeen years after his death, by Owen Wister in Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919, p. 280 — and in different words: "A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one."

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to J. P. Morgan. Use the credit shown above instead.

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In context

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest Morgan credit
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919
Published
Owen Wister · The Macmillan Company, New York, 1930 · quote page 280
Earliest close match
The Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, 11 February 1905, p. 7 — credited only to ‘some wise person’
Morgan source
None — no document, letter, speech or contemporary report; Morgan published no writings

My explanation of it is, that below every motive attributed by him, or by friend or enemy, to his action, lay the strongest element in his character. Pierpont Morgan once said: “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.” Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (1930), quote page 280

This is the earliest located source tying the saying to Morgan, and it is worth seeing how little it contains. Wister is explaining Theodore Roosevelt’s abrupt return to politics and reaches for the adage as an aside; “once said” is the whole of the provenance. Note also the wording — “for what he does—a good one, and the real one” — which is not the version now attributed to Morgan across the web.

Scanned 1930 first edition
Open the full scan at the Internet Archive
Wister’s 1930 memoir — full scan at the Internet Archive

How we traced it

  • Quote Investigator, whose chronology we follow here, documents the saying circulating well before Morgan’s name was attached: James Parton’s Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit (1872) reports that ‘a witty French author, descanting upon the foibles of the fair sex, remarks that a woman often has two reasons for her conduct: First, the reason; secondly, the reason that she gives’, and the Sacramento Daily Record-Union carried a man-centred version in December 1893 the chronology ↗.
  • The closest match QI locates before the Morgan credit predates it by a quarter-century and names no author at all: in the Rockford Daily Register-Gazette of 11 February 1905, page 7, Mrs. Walter B. Helm answered a toast with ‘Some wise person says, “There is always two reasons for doing a thing: one is a good reason and the other is the real reason.”’ — the ungrammatical ‘there is’ belongs to the period text Quote Investigator ↗.
  • We then read Wister’s book rather than trusting a quotation dictionary, and found the sentence in the scanned 1930 Macmillan edition, in the passage on Roosevelt’s return to politics: ‘Pierpont Morgan once said…’, with no supporting detail of any kind the scan ↗.
  • The exact wording this page is about turns up later still. The earliest instance of it in QI’s chronology is 1943, thirteen years after Wister: Thesaurus of Epigrams, edited by Edmund Fuller, page 249, prints ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything—a good reason and the real reason’ and credits J. P. Morgan. An unattributed variant — ‘two reasons for doing something’ — appears the same year in Esar’s Comic Dictionary, page 230 the chronology ↗.
  • Wikiquote’s J. P. Morgan page, which does carry his documented remarks, contains no version of this line in any wording Wikiquote ↗.
Public domain

The versions this page quotes at length were published in 1872, 1905 and 1930 and are out of copyright in the United States: Parton’s book (1872), the Rockford Daily Register-Gazette item (1905), and Wister’s memoir (The Macmillan Company, 1930). Later books in the chronology (1931, 1943, 1964) may still be in copyright; from those we quote only the one-line adage itself, for identification and comment. The saying has no identified author, so there is no author or estate who could hold rights in it — and we name none. This is not legal advice.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This one is not a pure invention — there is a real book behind the Morgan credit. But the book is a memoir published after Morgan was dead, the sentence in it is hearsay with no supporting detail, and the wording everyone now quotes is not even the wording the book contains.

J. P. Morgan — one posthumous, unsourced report hearsay, seventeen years after his death

Owen Wister’s 1930 memoir says only ‘Pierpont Morgan once said…’ — no date, no place, no occasion, no witness, and no indication Wister heard it himself. Morgan died in 1913 and published no writings, so there is nothing to check it against read the page in the 1930 scan ↗.

A later smoothing — first located in 1943, not in Wister 1943

Wister wrote ‘two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.’ The 1905 newspaper has ‘two reasons for doing a thing: one is a good reason and the other is the real reason.’ The version now credited to Morgan is in neither. Its earliest appearance in Quote Investigator’s chronology is 1943, in Thesaurus of Epigrams edited by Edmund Fuller, page 249, where it already carries Morgan’s name; an unattributed variant (‘for doing something’) appears the same year in Esar’s Comic Dictionary, page 230. So the sentence people quote is documented — just thirteen years after Wister and thirty after Morgan’s death, with no source putting it in his mouth. That it is a tidying-up of the older line is our reading; the chronology does not record how the wording shifted the chronology ↗.

Theodore Roosevelt 1931

A year after Wister’s book, Dow Thompson’s A Mind That Was Different (1931) gave the saying to Roosevelt instead — a neat illustration of how loose the attribution already was Quote Investigator ↗.

Thomas Carlyle no instance located

The Carlyle credit turns up in circulation, but QI’s dated chronology contains no Carlyle instance at all — it appears only in the question put to them, never in the evidence the chronology ↗.

An unnamed ‘witty French author’ 1872

James Parton’s 1872 book reports that ‘a witty French author, descanting upon the foibles of the fair sex, remarks that a woman often has two reasons for her conduct: First, the reason; secondly, the reason that she gives.’ Parton does not name him, so the trail goes cold at an anonymous Frenchman rather than at any of the famous men now credited Quote Investigator ↗.

An adage of unknown authorship: in print by 1872 in a women-focused form, in close-to-modern form by February 1905 credited to ‘some wise person’, and attached to J. P. Morgan only in 1930 — by Owen Wister, seventeen years after Morgan died, and in wording that differs from the version now quoted Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

Why it sticks to Morgan

The saying needs a speaker who is powerful, unsentimental and widely assumed to be working an angle — and in American memory that is Morgan. He consolidated industries, faced down a Senate committee, and was believed by half the country to have a private motive behind every public one. Put the adage in his mouth and it stops being folk wisdom and becomes a confession from the top of the system, which is a far better story.

There is a neat irony in it. A line about the difference between the reason a man gives and the reason he acts on has itself acquired a stated author and an unknown real one — and the stated author was supplied by a novelist writing about somebody else entirely.

A line about stated versus real reasons has a stated author — and an unknown real one.

What Wister was actually doing with it

In the memoir the adage is not presented as a Morgan anecdote at all. Wister is arguing about Theodore Roosevelt: he rejects both the enemies’ explanation (ambition) and the friends’ explanation (plain duty) for Roosevelt’s sudden decision to re-enter politics, and says that ‘below every motive attributed by him, or by friend or enemy, to his action, lay the strongest element in his character.’

The Morgan sentence follows as a one-line proof text for that claim, and Wister then moves straight on to the scene at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre where the decision was made. Morgan is a rhetorical borrowing, not the subject.

That is worth knowing, because it explains the thinness of the citation. Wister had no reason to document the remark — he was not reporting on Morgan, he was quoting a saying he assumed his readers already knew. Which, on the 1905 evidence, they did.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Character Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: A Person Has Two Reasons for Doing Anythingquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the full dated chronology from 1872 to the 1930 Morgan credit, and the rival 1931 Roosevelt credit.
Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (1930)archive.org

Full scan of the earliest located source crediting Morgan — read the sentence in context and see how little Wister gives.
J. P. Morgan — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Morgan’s documented remarks. Useful as a negative check: this line appears nowhere on it.
Owen Wisteren.wikipedia.org

Background on the man who put the line in Morgan’s mouth — novelist, author of The Virginian, and Roosevelt’s friend and biographer.
J. P. Morganen.wikipedia.org

Life and career of the financier the saying is pinned to, including the U.S. Steel consolidation and the Panic of 1907.
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendshipen.wikipedia.org

Catalogue detail on the 1930 Macmillan memoir that is the origin of the Morgan attribution.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Morgan

J. P. Morgan

1837–1913 · American financier and banker · U.S. Steel and the Panic of 1907

John Pierpont Morgan Sr. was the dominant investment banker of the Gilded Age, assembling U.S. Steel and personally organising the rescue that ended the Panic of 1907. He is close to the ideal magnet for an adage about concealed motives: enormously powerful, famously terse, widely suspected of having a second agenda behind every public one, and — crucially — the author of no books, which leaves nothing to check a quotation against. Wikiquote’s collection of his documented remarks ↗ does not include this one.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Anonymous adage; Morgan credit first in Wister, 1930

Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 280 — the earliest located source crediting J. P. Morgan, published seventeen years after his death in 1913, and worded “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.” A close match appeared earlier in the Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, 11 February 1905, 7, credited only to “some wise person”; a women-focused precursor appears in James Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit (Chicago: Virtue & Yorston, 1872), 607.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-man-always-has-two-reasons-for-doing-anything-a-good/

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