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Who really said it

Common Sense Is Nothing More Than a Deposit of Prejudices Laid Down in the Mind Before Age Eighteen

Attributed to Albert Einstein 1879–1955 · German-born theoretical physicist
Attributed In copyright

This is a genuine grey area, and the honest answer is “his idea, someone else’s sentence”. The words first appear in the science writer Lincoln Barnett’s Harper’s Magazine article of May 1948: “But as Einstein has pointed out, common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen” — ascribed to Einstein, but deliberately not in quotation marks. Einstein then wrote the foreword to the book that article became, and raised no objection. No source in Einstein’s own words has ever been located.

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

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Common Sense Is Nothing More Than a Deposit of Prejudices Laid Down in the Mind Before Age Eighteen” Lincoln Barnett, attributing the view to Albert Einstein, in “The Universe and Dr. Einstein: Part II,” Harper’s Magazine 196 (May 1948): 473; book edition p. 49. Barnett did not use quotation marks, and no source in Einstein’s own words has been found. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Lincoln Barnett; Harper & Brothers and Victor Gollancz as original publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Earliest documented source
The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Part II
Publication
Lincoln Barnett, in Harper’s Magazine, vol. 196, May 1948 — article begins p. 465, passage on p. 473, col. 1 (Quote Investigator verified this on microfilm)
Book form
The Universe and Dr. Einstein (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949; copyright 1948), passage on page 49 — with a foreword by Albert Einstein
Crucial detail
Barnett used no quotation marks. The first appearance as a direct quotation is E. T. Bell’s Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1951), p. 42.

At first meeting, these facts are difficult to digest, but that is simply because classical physics assumed, unjustifiably, that an object preserves the same dimensions whether it is in motion or at rest and that a clock keeps the same rhythm in motion and at rest. Common sense dictates that this must be so. But as Einstein has pointed out, common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen. Every new idea one encounters in later years must combat this accretion of “self-evident” concepts. Lincoln Barnett, page 49

Note what is not there: quotation marks. Barnett is summarising a position he attributes to Einstein, not transcribing him. We read this passage ourselves in the text of the Gollancz printing held by the Internet Archive ↗, on the page numbered 49, and it matches Quote Investigator’s transcription from the May 1948 Harper’s original word for word.

Quote Investigator: Barnett, Bell, Calaprice and the paper trail

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ locates the earliest evidence in Lincoln Barnett’s “The Universe and Dr. Einstein: Part II”, Harper’s Magazine vol. 196, May 1948, page 473 — verified on microfilm — and records that Barnett did not place the words in quotation marks.
  • We then checked the book ourselves rather than taking the locator on trust. The Internet Archive’s text of the Victor Gollancz printing ↗ carries the sentence on the page numbered 49, in exactly the wording Quote Investigator reports, and Einstein’s own foreword — “Lincoln Barnett’s book represents a valuable contribution to popular scientific writing” — stands at the front of the same volume.
  • The first version in quotation marks is later and second-hand: E. T. Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (McGraw-Hill, 1951), chapter 3, page 42, recalling “Einstein’s remark that ‘common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen’”. See the 1951 citation ↗
  • Wikiquote files the line under “Disputed” for Einstein ↗, noting that Alice Calaprice’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein calls it “probably not by Einstein” while pointing to the Barnett passage as a reasonably plausible source. We agree with that balance, which is why this page says “attributed” rather than “verified”.
In copyright

The wording everyone quotes is Lincoln Barnett’s, first published in Harper’s Magazine in May 1948 and in book form the same year — long after the pre-1931 cut-off for the US public domain, so this text is in copyright. Because no sentence in Einstein’s own words matching this line has been found, there is no separate Einstein source whose rights could be assessed.

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 fine print

Nobody is being framed here. The question is subtler: are these Einstein’s words, or Einstein’s idea in somebody else’s words?

Lincoln Barnett Paraphrase

Barnett wrote it. He attributed the view to Einstein and pointedly declined to use quotation marks, which is what a careful writer does when reporting a position rather than a sentence. Everything since is people quoting Barnett quoting Einstein. See the 1948 passage ↗

E. T. Bell Quoted, not authored

In Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1951), page 42, Bell recalled “Einstein’s remark” and set it inside quotation marks for the first time — three years after Barnett, and from memory. Compare the two ↗

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen” Later variant

That is the tightened version most sites print. Alice Calaprice files it at page 481 of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) under “Probably Not By Einstein”, having found no supporting citation for it. See the 2010 entry ↗

Its “Disputed” list Documented but unverified

Wikiquote keeps the line under Disputed ↗, citing Calaprice’s doubt alongside the Barnett passage as a plausible origin — the same split verdict this page reaches.

Best evidence: the sentence people quote is Lincoln Barnett’s, from Harper’s Magazine, May 1948, page 473 — a view he ascribed to Einstein without claiming to quote him. Einstein wrote the foreword to the resulting book — evidence, as Quote Investigator puts it, that he had read the manuscript and had not objected. That is real evidence. It is still not a transcript.

Context

Why it mattered

Barnett was not making an aphorism; he was making an argument. The paragraph is about why relativity feels absurd — why a moving clock keeping a different rhythm offends us — and the common-sense line is the hinge. His point was that the intuitions physics has to overturn are not innate truths but habits, laid down early and defended fiercely. Einstein’s gift, Barnett went on, was an unwillingness to accept any unproven principle as self-evident.

Detached from that paragraph, the sentence became something else: a general-purpose licence to distrust received opinion, printed on posters and pinned to Einstein because he is the shorthand for genius. The idea survived the journey. The argument it belonged to did not.

Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.

Read the full story

The strongest evidence for Einstein is the foreword. He wrote it for the book that carries this passage, and it is warm: the work is “a valuable contribution to popular scientific writing” and “the main ideas of the theory of relativity are extremely well presented”. That tells us he read the manuscript, or enough of it to endorse it, and did not ask for the line to come out. But be precise about what it proves: the foreword praises the book in general and never mentions this sentence. It is evidence of no objection, not evidence of authorship.

The evidence on the other side is the compact version everybody actually shares. Alice Calaprice, who edited the standard collection of Einstein quotations for Princeton, puts “common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen” in her “Probably Not By Einstein” section, because no citation supports it. Both things can be true at once: the thought is fairly attributed to Einstein, and the crisp sentence attached to his name was written by other people.

Explore

Filed under

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

Doubt Knowledge 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 Investigatorquoteinvestigator.com

The 1948 Barnett passage, the 1951 first quoted form, and why the short version has no citation.
Albert Einstein — Disputeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s Disputed section, where this line sits with the arguments on both sides.
The Universe and Dr. Einsteinarchive.org

The Gollancz printing whose page 49 we read to confirm the wording, with Einstein’s foreword at the front.
Lincoln Barnetten.wikipedia.org

Who Barnett was: a New York editor and science writer, 1909–1979.
Albert Einsteinen.wikipedia.org

Biography and dates (1879–1955) for the man the thought is credited to.

The author

About Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

1879–1955 · German-born theoretical physicist

Anything wry and clever about school, imagination or stupidity tends to drift onto Einstein’s name; Wikiquote keeps unusually long Disputed and Misattributed lists for him precisely because, as it says itself, misattributed quotations for Einstein are very common. This line is a rarer and more interesting case: not a fabrication pinned on him after his death, but a view a working journalist ascribed to him in print while he was alive to read it, in a book he supplied a foreword for. That is a good deal more evidence than most Einstein quotations carry, and still short of proof he ever said it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Barnett, Lincoln. “The Universe and Dr. Einstein: Part II.” Harper’s Magazine 196 (May 1948): 465–473, at 473. Also in Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949; copyright 1948), 49, with a foreword by Albert Einstein. Barnett does not present the words as a direct quotation.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Common Sense Is Nothing More Than a Deposit of Prejudices Laid Down in the Mind Before Age Eighteen’?” Last verified 29 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/common-sense-is-nothing-more-than-a-deposit-of-prejudices/

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