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Who really said it

Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It's This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out

Not Chekhov and not Odets — actually George Seaton George Seaton 1911–1979 · American screenwriter and director, Oscar winner for this film
Disputed In copyright

Two separate mistakes stacked up to make this quotation, and Quote Investigator takes both apart ↗. The nearest real line is film dialogue: in The Country Girl (1954), Bing Crosby, playing the alcoholic actor Frank Elgin, says “Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough.” The film was adapted from a Clifford Odets play — which is how Odets got the credit — but it was written for the screen by George Seaton, who won that year’s Academy Award for it. QI checked the 1951 published text of Odets’s play and found neither the film line nor the modern quotation in it, concluding that it “would credit Seaton with the line”. The punchy wording everyone quotes is later still: it was written in 1971, by two textbook editors paraphrasing the scene from memory. Chekhov enters only because they mentioned him in the same breath.

Last verified 3 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It's This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out” Not Chekhov and not Odets. The nearest real line is George Seaton's, for the film The Country Girl (1954): “Just about anybody can face a crisis. It's that everyday living that's rough.” The familiar wording — “Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out” — first appears in a 1971 textbook paraphrasing that scene. Via quotle.info

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Allyn and Bacon for the 1971 textbook wording; Paramount Pictures and the estate of George Seaton for the 1954 film dialogue). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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

In context

Evoking the world of George Seaton — American screenwriter, director and producer. Theme: "Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It's This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out". 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 "Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It's This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out". 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

Where it actually comes from

Nearest real line
The Country Girl (1954), screenplay by George Seaton
As spoken
Bing Crosby as Frank Elgin: “Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough.”
This exact wording
The Tradition of the Theatre, eds. Peter Bauland and William Ingram (Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1971), page 405
First credited to Chekhov
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1971–81 vintage — 1981 edition, page 39, under “Bores and Boredom”, with no citation
In Chekhov’s works
Not found. QI reports a questioner’s Slavicist searching the Russian originals without success

I faced a crisis up there in Boston, and I got away with it. Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough. I’m not sure I can lick it, but I think I got a chance. At 1:37 of 1:44

Frank Elgin’s dialogue in The Country Girl, transcribed by Quote Investigator from the film itself ↗ at roughly 1 hour 37 minutes of its 1 hour 44. Read it against the famous version: Seaton has just about anybody where the quotation has any idiot, that everyday living where it has this day-to-day living, and rough where it has wears you out. Not one of the memorable words is his.

Quote Investigator: Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It’s This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s investigation ↗ states its verdict directly: “there is no substantive evidence that Chekhov wrote or said the quotation under examination.” It names two mechanisms — paraphrase, and the misreading of a passage containing two names next to a quotation — and says both happened here.
  • The film line is QI’s earliest partial match, verified from the film: The Country Girl, Paramount Pictures, copyright 1954, based on a play by Clifford Odets, written for the screen by George Seaton, with Frank Elgin played by Bing Crosby. Wikipedia confirms the credits independently ↗: Seaton wrote and directed, adapting Odets’s 1950 play, and “Seaton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay while Kelly won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role.”
  • QI then rules Odets out on evidence rather than inference: it examined The Country Girl: A Play in Three Acts by Clifford Odets (Viking Press, New York, 1951) on paper, and reports that the film line was absent and the modern quotation was absent too. A correspondent also listened to an LA Theatre Works production and checked a script online; the scene matching the film’s contains nothing like it.
  • The exact wording in circulation debuts in a textbook: The Tradition of the Theatre, edited by Peter Bauland and William Ingram, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, copyright 1971, page 405, in the editors’ introduction to The Cherry Orchard. They write: “A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950’s casually drops this line: ‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.’ The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America’s chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov…” — wrong about the screenwriter, and with Chekhov’s name one line away from the quotation marks.
  • The Chekhov credit itself QI first finds in The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, 1981, page 39, in the section “Bores and Boredom”, with no citation given — verified for QI by a librarian at St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto. The same entry carried into the 1986 enlarged edition and the 1987 Barnes & Noble Book of Quotations, which is how it reached columnists: Bobby Wolff’s bridge column in 1985, Molly Ivins in Mother Jones in 1990, and a New York Times profile in 1999.
  • An honest precursor, and the only part of this story that is genuinely old, is in Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs ↗, which QI flags and which was read directly here. Judy Abbott writes: “It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires SPIRIT.” Same thought, forty-two years earlier, and nobody attributes it to her.
In copyright

In copyright in the United States, in both of its forms. The familiar wording was first published in 1971, in a textbook from Allyn and Bacon; the film line it paraphrases is Paramount Pictures dialogue from 1954, written by George Seaton. Both are long after the 1931 public-domain cutoff. The one element here that is free to use is the 1912 precursor from Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs, which is public domain and linked above. Everything quoted on this page is quoted briefly for comment and criticism.

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

This is a two-stage error, and both stages are documented. Quote Investigator reconstructs the whole chain ↗: a film line was paraphrased into a sharper sentence, credited to the wrong writer, and then handed to a Russian playwright who had been dead for sixty-seven years when the sentence was written.

Anton Chekhov No evidence

QI’s conclusion is flat ↗: “there is no substantive evidence that Chekhov wrote or said the quotation under examination.” The questioner who prompted the investigation had a Slavicist search the Russian originals and found nothing. Chekhov died in 1904; the wording dates from 1971. His name is in the story only because the 1971 textbook invoked him as Odets’s master in the sentence beside the quotation, and a later reader picked the wrong name.

Clifford Odets Wrong writer

The 1971 textbook says “The screenplay was by Clifford Odets”. It was not: Odets wrote the play, George Seaton wrote the screenplay and won the Oscar for it. QI examined Odets’s published 1951 play text and found neither the film line nor the quotation in it. So Odets is doubly clear — not the words, and not even the medium.

Peter Bauland and William Ingram, 1971 Modern paraphrase

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out” is their sentence, not Seaton’s. QI conjectures it “was constructed from a flawed memory of the line in ‘The Country Girl’”, and the two texts share no distinctive phrase. If anyone deserves credit for the quotation as quoted, it is two theatre-textbook editors who were trying to paraphrase a film.

Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) Ancestor

Forty-two years before the film, Webster’s heroine wrote: “Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires SPIRIT.” QI flags it as a precursor and it checks out against the public-domain text. It is the earliest form of the idea located, and it is not the source of the modern wording — just proof the thought was in the air.

QI’s verdict ↗: Chekhov did not say it, Odets did not write it, and the sentence in circulation was composed in 1971 by textbook editors misremembering a Bing Crosby movie. Of the people involved, George Seaton is the one who actually wrote a line like it.

Context

Why it mattered

This quotation is a textbook case of how misattribution works, and the irony is that it came from an actual textbook. Nobody lied. An editor remembered a good line from a film, wrote it down more sharply than it was spoken, got the screenwriting credit wrong, and invoked Chekhov as the tradition behind it. Everything after that is readers doing what readers do with two names and one pair of quotation marks.

What makes it stick is that it sounds exactly like Chekhov — that is the whole trap. His plays are about people being worn down by ordinary afternoons rather than catastrophes, so the sentence passes a plausibility test that has nothing to do with evidence. A quote that fits an author’s reputation is harder to dislodge than one that does not.

Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough.

Read the full story

QI names the two mechanisms at work, and they are worth knowing separately. The first is paraphrase: a real line is replaced by a different sentence of roughly the same meaning, which then circulates as a quotation. The second is adjacency: when a passage puts two names next to a quotation, readers sometimes take the wrong one. Here the 1971 introduction supplied both faults in three lines of print — a paraphrased film line, a wrong screenwriting credit, and Chekhov named as Odets’s master immediately afterwards.

The vector that spread it was a reference book. QI finds the Chekhov ascription first in the 1981 Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, filed under “Bores and Boredom” with no citation at all, and then in the 1986 revision and the 1987 Barnes & Noble Book of Quotations. QI calls these volumes “powerful vectors for transmission”, and the trail after them runs through a 1985 syndicated bridge column, Molly Ivins in Mother Jones in 1990, and a 1999 New York Times profile of an advertising executive who kept it on a slip of paper on his desk.

One honest limit on this page: George Seaton is credited here because that is QI’s conclusion after checking Odets’s play text, and because Seaton is the screenwriter of record. QI reached the film dialogue through a streaming copy rather than a published screenplay, and no shooting script was consulted here. If a published script ever shows the line arriving from somewhere else, the credit moves.

Explore

Filed under

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

Resilience Time Work

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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: Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis…quoteinvestigator.com

The full chain: the 1954 film line, the 1971 textbook paraphrase, the 1981 Chekhov ascription, and the 1912 precursor.
The Country Girl (1954 film)en.wikipedia.org

Confirms Seaton wrote and directed, adapting Odets’s play, and won the Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
George Seatonen.wikipedia.org

The screenwriter who actually wrote the line this quotation garbles.
Clifford Odetsen.wikipedia.org

The playwright wrongly credited with the screenplay by the 1971 textbook.
Anton Chekhoven.wikipedia.org

Died 15 July 1904, sixty-seven years before the sentence was written.
Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster (1912)www.gutenberg.org

The public-domain precursor: “Anybody can rise to a crisis… the petty hazards of the day with a laugh.”

The author

About George Seaton

George Seaton

1911–1979 · American screenwriter, director and producer

George Seaton (born George Edward Stenius, 17 April 1911 – 28 July 1979) was an American screenwriter, playwright, director and producer. He won two Academy Awards for screenwriting — for Miracle on 34th Street and for The Country Girl (1954), which he also directed and which won Grace Kelly her Best Actress Oscar. He later served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is credited here not because he coined the famous sentence, but because the only real line behind it is one he wrote.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The documented origin (Chicago)

The Country Girl, directed and written for the screen by George Seaton, based on the play by Clifford Odets (Paramount Pictures, 1954), dialogue of Frank Elgin. For the familiar wording see Peter Bauland and William Ingram, eds., The Tradition of the Theatre (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1971), 405. Both cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It’s This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out,” 14 June 2013. Precursor: Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs (New York: The Century Company, 1912), 78–79.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis; It’s This Day-To-Day Living That Wears You Out’?” Last verified 3 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/any-idiot-can-face-a-crisis-its-this-day-to-day-living-that/

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