Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For

Not Albert Einstein — actually John A. Shedd John A. Shedd Life dates not established · American aphorist, compiler of Salt from My Attic (1928)
Disputed Free to reuse

The sentence appears in Salt from My Attic, a slim book of sayings compiled by John A. Shedd and printed by the Mosher Press of Portland, Maine, in 1928 — page 20. Both Quote Investigator ↗ and Fred R. Shapiro’s Yale Book of Quotations credit Shedd. The earliest Einstein credit anyone has documented is a 1995 newspaper column, and it carries no source at all.

Last verified 29 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For” John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic (Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1928), p. 20. Not Albert Einstein: the earliest documented Einstein credit is a 1995 newspaper column, with no source; Grace Hopper used a “ship in port” variant but did not coin it. — Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Albert Einstein. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of John A. Shedd — compiler of Salt from My Attic (1928) · life dates not established. Theme: "A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For". 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 Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For". 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 documented source
Salt from My Attic
Compiler & imprint
John A. Shedd · The Mosher Press, Portland, Maine, 1928
Located at
Page 20 — the locator Quote Investigator gives, verified there against photo images of the book
Independently credited by
The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro (Yale University Press, 2006), page 705, under John A. Shedd

When it is rose leaves all the way, we soon become drowsy; thorns are necessary to wake us… We have strength for today’s work. If yesterday’s is added, we stagger; if we try to carry tomorrow’s, down we go… A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. Three of Shedd’s sayings, as reprinted in 1931

Shedd’s book is a collection of standalone aphorisms, so the line has no surrounding passage of its own. Those are its neighbours as the syndicated columnist Ed Howe reprinted them in May 1931, three years after the book appeared, describing Shedd as “an amateur”. Both the reprint and the 1928 page-20 locator come from Quote Investigator ↗, which verified the book against photo images; we could not reach a scan of it ourselves.

Quote Investigator: Shedd, Hopper, Einstein and the citation trail

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ traces the adage to John A. Shedd’s Salt from My Attic (The Mosher Press, Portland, Maine, 1928), page 20, verified against photo images of the book, and records the same credit in the Yale Book of Quotations (2006), page 705.
  • The same survey shows the line circulating under Shedd’s name for decades before either famous claimant: Ed Howe’s syndicated column in May 1931, newspaper filler items in March 1949 attributed to “J. A. Shedd”, and Earl Wilson’s column in October 1965. See the chronology ↗
  • On Einstein, Quote Investigator is blunt: the ascription “is unsupported” and “appeared late and was not substantive”. Its earliest example is a 1995 column in the San Bernardino County Sun, of which QI notes that Einstein “had died in 1955”. Wikipedia confirms those dates (1879–1955) ↗
  • We also checked Wikiquote’s Albert Einstein page ↗, which maintains sourced, disputed and misattributed sections for him: the line appears in none of them.
Public domain

The sentence was first published in Salt from My Attic in 1928. US copyright now reaches only works published before 1931, so the 1928 text is in the public domain and can be quoted and reused freely.

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

Often misattributed

Two famous names have absorbed this line, by two quite different routes.

Albert Einstein No source

The Einstein credit is late and thin. The earliest instance Quote Investigator documents ↗ is a 1995 advice column in the San Bernardino County Sun — QI notes pointedly that Einstein “had died in 1955” — and its verdict is that the ascription “is unsupported”.

Grace Hopper Popularizer, not author

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper genuinely used it. In a February 1981 San Diego Union interview she called it “a motto that has stuck with me”, in the ‘ship in port’ form. But the saying was already in print under Shedd’s name in 1928 and running in newspapers by 1931, and QI concludes she “helped to popularize it” without coining it ↗

Theodore Roosevelt Ancestor

A December 1901 item in the Duluth News-Tribune paraphrased Roosevelt’s view that warships “are not built to rust and rot in harbor” — the same image, decades earlier. The wording there was not attributed to him, and the adage is not his. See the 1901 citation ↗

Best evidence: John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic (Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1928), page 20 — the source Quote Investigator ↗ and the Yale Book of Quotations both give.

Context

Why it mattered

Shedd’s line is a rare thing: an aphorism that outgrew its author so completely that the author fell off it. For nearly a century it has been reassigned to whoever the speaker most admires — a computer pioneer, a physicist — because the sentence sounds like the sort of thing a great mind says, and nobody remembers a man called Shedd.

Grace Hopper’s version is the one that did the most work. She used it to argue for letting young engineers try things, and she used it often enough that a generation of programmers heard it in her voice. That is usually how a quotation changes hands: not by forgery, but by repetition from someone more famous.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Read the full story

The two false credits work by different mechanisms, and it is worth keeping them apart. Hopper really did say it and is simply mistaken for its originator — an honest slippage from speaker to author. Einstein appears to have had no connection to the line whatever: the credit shows up decades after his death, in a newspaper column, with no source attached. That is the standard profile of an attribution invented to lend a sentence authority.

Shedd’s book has proved genuinely hard to reach. Quote Investigator worked from photo images of the 1928 Mosher Press printing supplied by a researcher, and the Yale Book of Quotations independently records the same source at page 705 of its 2006 edition. We could not reach a digital copy from here, so the page-20 locator on this page is theirs rather than ours — two independent references agreeing on it is why we are comfortable printing it.

Explore

Filed under

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

Courage Growth Purpose

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 Investigatorquoteinvestigator.com

The full trail from Shedd’s 1928 book through Grace Hopper to the late Einstein credit.
Albert Einstein — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced, disputed and misattributed lists for Einstein. This line appears in none of them.
Albert Einsteinen.wikipedia.org

Biography and dates (1879–1955) for the man the saying was pinned on decades later.
Grace Hopperen.wikipedia.org

The US Navy officer and computer scientist (1906–1992) who made the saying famous without writing it.
Thomas Bird Mosheren.wikipedia.org

The Portland, Maine private-press publisher whose Mosher Press printed Shedd’s collection.

The author

About John A. Shedd

John A. Shedd

American aphorist · compiler of Salt from My Attic (1928) · life dates not established

John A. Shedd is one of the quieter figures in quotation history: the author of one of the most repeated sentences in English, and a man about whom almost nothing is recorded. In 1928 the Mosher Press of Portland, Maine printed his slim collection Salt from My Attic; three years later the syndicated columnist Ed Howe reprinted several of its lines and described him simply as an amateur. The Yale Book of Quotations credits him with the ship adage. We could not find birth or death dates for him in any reference we were able to reach, and we would rather say so than guess.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Shedd, John A. Salt from My Attic. Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1928, page 20. Earliest documented appearance, per Quote Investigator ↗ (verified against photo images) and the Yale Book of Quotations (2006), page 705.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For’?” Last verified 29 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-ship-in-harbor-is-safe-but-that-is-not-what-ships-are/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied