Genuine, and pinned to the page. The sentence closes a paragraph on page 90 of Milne’s essay “The Record Lie,” in his 1920 collection If I May (Methuen & Co., London) — confirmed in the scanned first edition and in the full text at Project Gutenberg. Milne’s own opening word is For, which the popular version drops.
“A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business” A. A. Milne, "The Record Lie," in If I May (London: Methuen & Co., 1920), p. 90 · Verbatim: “For a quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.”
Can you use it?
✓ Free to use in the US, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed. Outside the US it is not so simple: Milne died on 31 January 1956, so in life-plus-70 countries (UK/EU) the essay stays in copyright until 1 January 2027.
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In context
Evoking the world of A. A. Milne — English essayist, playwright and creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Theme: "A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business". 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
Work
If I May
Essay
“The Record Lie” — starts page 89
First published
1920 · Methuen & Co., London
Quoted page
Page 90, confirmed in the scanned first edition
Two thousand years from now people will still be quoting it, and killing each other on the strength of it. Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps two thousand years from now, if the English language is sufficiently dead by then, the world will have some casual paradox of Bernard Shaw’s or Oscar Wilde’s on its lips, passing it reverently from mouth to mouth as if it were Holy Writ, and dropping bombs on Mars to show that they know what it means. For a quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.If I May (1920), pages 89–90
Note Milne’s opening word: For. The famous version begins “A quotation…”, which severs the sentence from the paragraph it was written to explain.
Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Milne should receive credit for the remark, citing the essay “The Record Lie” in the 1920 collection, start page 89, quote page 90, Methuen & Company, London.
Wikiquote’s Milne page ↗ does not list this line at all — its quote sections cover only the four Pooh and children’s-verse books, which is a fair measure of how thoroughly the adult essays have been eclipsed.
✓Public domain
If I May was first published in 1920 by Methuen & Co. in London — comfortably before the 1931 cutoff for United States copyright — so the essay and this sentence are in the public domain in the US. Project Gutenberg hosts the complete text on that basis ↗, listing it as public domain in the USA.
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
What travels wrong
The name on this one is right — unusually, for a Milne quotation. What gets mangled is the wording, the setting and the citation.
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The wording“A quotation is a handy thing…” Trimmed
Milne wrote “For a quotation is a handy thing to have about…” — the For chains the sentence to the argument it explains. Circulating versions cut it silently; Goodreads at least brackets the repair as “[A] quotation…” ↗, which is honest but still hides what the sentence was answering.
✕
The settingFiled as a whimsical thought about quoting Mis-framed
Aggregators print it bare — LibQuotes credits only If I May ↗, with no essay named. In the book it is the hinge of an attack on Si vis pacem, para bellum, two sentences after Milne pictures people still “killing each other on the strength of it” in two thousand years’ time.
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The citationA 2013 print-on-demand omnibus Citation drift
It sounds like a light remark about the habit of quoting. It is actually the sting in an anti-war essay. In “The Record Lie,” Milne — who had served on the Somme in 1916 and been invalided home with trench fever — opens by complaining that he has “just seen it quoted again”: Si vis pacem, para bellum, if you want peace, prepare for war. He calls it “the record lie of the ages, the lie which has caused more suffering than anything the Devil could have invented for himself,” and imagines the Roman who coined it as a fat, easy-going gentleman who threw off good things after dinner and admitted he did not quite know what it meant.
The line about quotations is the pivot. Milne has just predicted that people will still be repeating the tag two thousand years hence, “killing each other on the strength of it” — and then explains why: a ready-made phrase spares you the work of thinking. The target is not quotation as a pastime. It is the borrowed slogan doing the arguing.
Two thousand years from now people will still be quoting it, and killing each other on the strength of it.
The pacifism didn’t hold
Milne pressed the argument much further in Peace with Honour (1934), a denunciation of war, then walked it back in War with Honour (1940). During the Second World War he served as a captain in the British Home Guard at Hartfield and Forest Row. Quote Investigator notes the same reversal: the events of the war caused him to re-evaluate his pacifist position.
The sentence has kept working as Milne intended. Quote Investigator records a Louisville Courier-Journal columnist, Tim Sullivan, reprinting it on 28 September 2014 while debunking the same Latin adage — “an adage popular among defense contractors” — and noting that the celebrated author of Winnie the Pooh “once went all Eeyore on the subject of quotations.”
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1882–1956 · English essayist, playwright and creator of Winnie-the-Pooh
Alan Alexander Milne (18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956) joined the staff of Punch in 1906 and became its assistant editor, building a career as a humorist, playwright and novelist long before the bear arrived. He was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1915, served on the Somme from July to November 1916, and was invalided home with trench fever. The Pooh books of 1926 and 1928 came to overshadow everything else he wrote — which is why an adult essay line like this one is so often filed under the wrong shelf.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
A. A. Milne, “The Record Lie,” in If I May (London: Methuen & Co., 1920), 89–92; quoted sentence on page 90.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-quotation-is-a-handy-thing-to-have-about-saving-one-the/