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Who really said it

Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential

Not Winston Churchill — actually Liane Cordes Liane Cordes American meditation writer · author of “The Reflecting Pond” (Hazelden, 1981)
Disputed In copyright

This exact longer wording — the version with “and using” still in it — is the original. Quote Investigator locates it at page 89 of Liane Cordes’s 1981 Hazelden meditation book The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery ↗, and finds no substantive support for Churchill, who is not credited with it in Churchill by Himself, the standard collection of his quotations.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential” Liane Cordes, The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1981), 89 — commonly misattributed to Winston Churchill. Via Quotle.info.

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Liane Cordes and Hazelden Publishing (Center City, Minnesota)). 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

Evoking the world of Liane Cordes — The Reflecting Pond (Hazelden, 1981). Theme: "Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential". 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 "Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential". 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 1981 meditation book

Work
The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery
Author
Liane Cordes
First published
1981 · Hazelden, Center City, Minnesota
Quote page
Page 89 (per Quote Investigator’s bibliography)

Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking and using our potential. 1981 · page 89

This is the sentence as Quote Investigator reproduces it from the 1981 book. The surrounding meditation on page 89 is not reproduced here — the book is still in copyright, and no public full-text search of it was available to confirm the neighbouring lines.

Quote Investigator’s chronology of this saying

How we verified this

In copyright

The Reflecting Pond was first published by Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota, in 1981 ↗ — well inside the United States copyright term, so this sentence is protected, not public domain. It is quoted here in full as a single line for the purpose of identifying and correcting its authorship.

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 went wrong on the way here

Two separate errors ride on this sentence: the wrong author, and — in the version most people see — the wrong words. Both are documented.

Winston Churchill No attribution

Churchill’s own editor, Richard Langworth, lists the line twice among quotations Churchill never said — under “Effort” and under “Persistence,” both marked “No attribution” ↗ — and the International Churchill Society’s red-herring article calls a short form of it “No attribution found.” It is absent from Churchill by Himself, the standard collection Langworth edited.

Liane Cardes Misspelling

A 1986 quotation compendium credited “Liane Cardes” rather than Cordes; Quote Investigator judges this a simple spelling error and tracks it still circulating in a 2003 syndicated column ↗.

The shortened “unlocking our potential” version Two words dropped

The same 1986 compendium printed the line without “and using,” and that trimmed form is the one that spread — including in the 2001 newspaper item and the 2004 Trump business book that QI cites as early Churchill ascriptions ↗. Cordes’s published sentence is the longer one.

Credit Liane Cordes, The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery (Hazelden, 1981), page 89 ↗ — and use her full wording, with “and using” left in.

Context

How a recovery meditation became a Churchillism

The line was written for a very specific reader. Hazelden is the publisher attached to the Minnesota model of addiction treatment, and The Reflecting Pond is a book of short meditations for people doing aftercare — one subject per chapter, no heroics. Read in that setting, the sentence is not a leadership aphorism at all: it is reassurance that you do not need to be strong or clever to get better, only to keep going.

Detached from the book, it reads like a maxim, and a maxim wants a famous mouth. Two things helped it find one. In 1986 a quotation compendium reprinted the line two words shorter and misspelled the author as “Cardes” — and Quote Investigator notes that Cordes and Churchill sit close together in an alphabetical list of sources ↗, a known mechanism for this kind of slippage. And the sentiment is pure Churchillian archetype: endurance, stubbornness, keeping on. By 2001 a newspaper was printing it over his name, and by 2004 it was in a Donald Trump business book as Churchill’s.

A meditation written for people in recovery became a boardroom Churchillism.

Two wordings, and which one is the original

The version Cordes published in 1981 is the longer one: “Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking and using our potential.” The version that circulates today, on posters and quote sites and in Churchill’s name, is the trimmed one that first appeared in a 1986 compilation, with “and using” removed.

So the popular Churchill quotation is doubly wrong: wrong author, and not even the author’s own sentence. Richard Langworth records the trimmed form as “No attribution,” reported in Investor’s Business Daily in August 2008 ↗.

Explore

Filed under

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

Work Growth Success

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 Investigator: the full tracingquoteinvestigator.com

The authoritative investigation: Cordes 1981 at page 89, the 1986 trimming and “Cardes” misspelling, and the first Churchill ascriptions in 2001 and 2004.
Langworth, Red Herrings (1: Accept Change–EU)richardlangworth.com

Churchill’s editor lists the line under “Effort” among quotations Churchill never said, marked “No attribution.”
Langworth, Red Herrings (3: Lies to Sex)richardlangworth.com

The same list files it again under “Persistence,” noting it was reported in Investor’s Business Daily in August 2008.
International Churchill Society: Red Herringswinstonchurchill.org

Finest Hour 141 lists a short form, “Continuous effort is the key to unlocking our potential,” as “No attribution found.”
The Reflecting Pond (scanned copy)archive.org

Borrowable scan of the 1988 Harper/Hazelden printing; its record states the book was originally published Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1981.
Open Library: the 1981 Hazelden editionopenlibrary.org

Catalogue record for the first edition — Hazelden, Center City, MN, 1981, 140 pages, ISBN 0894861212.

The real author

Who was Liane Cordes?

Liane Cordes

American meditation writer · The Reflecting Pond (Hazelden, 1981)

Liane Cordes wrote The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery, published in 1981 by Hazelden, the Minnesota publisher whose list serves people in addiction recovery and aftercare. The book is a set of short meditations arranged by subject — self-acceptance, fear, friendship, love — and it is the work she is known for; almost nothing else about her is on the public record, and no life dates are documented. The sentence the internet gives to Churchill is hers, written for readers doing slow, unglamorous, day-by-day work on themselves.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Liane Cordes, The Reflecting Pond: Meditations for Self-Discovery (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1981), 89. Page reference per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential,” August 21, 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/continuous-effort-not-strength-or-intelligence-is-the-key/

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