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Who really said it

Every Dogma Has Its Day

Not Anthony Burgess — an anonymous Victorian pun Anonymous First exact match in print 1 April 1873 · The Critic-Record, Washington, D.C.
Disputed Free to reuse

Quote Investigator traced the wordplay to an unnamed local joker — a “merry-andrew” — whose line was reported in a Washington newspaper in 1873, and found no instance of it anywhere in Anthony Burgess’s works. The fullest documented use belongs to the novelist Israel Zangwill, who said it in a speech at a dinner for Tolstoy’s seventieth birthday, printed in The Critic in October 1898.

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

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Every Dogma Has Its Day” origin anonymous: an exact match was printed in The Critic-Record (Washington, D.C.) on 1 April 1873, credited to an unnamed local joker. Israel Zangwill used the line in a speech printed in The Critic, October 1898, p. 279. Commonly misattributed to Anthony Burgess, in whose works it has not been found. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Every dogma has its day, just as every dog has.”

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

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In context

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Provenance

The best-documented use

Earliest exact match
“Jottings About Town,” The Critic-Record (Washington, D.C.), 1 April 1873, p. 6 — credited to an unnamed local “merry-andrew” (per Quote Investigator)
Precursor
“Prophetic Almanacks,” London Review, 16 December 1865, p. 639 (per Quote Investigator)
Documented in
The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art and Life, Vol. 33, no. 856, October 1898, p. 279
Occasion
Israel Zangwill’s speech at the dinner for Leo Tolstoy’s seventieth birthday, Hotel St. Denis, New York, Thursday evening, 8 September 1898

… because great art is greater than all dogmas, which have their short life—every dogma has its day, just as every dog has,—but great art lives on with fresh meaning and fresh inspiration every year. Therefore I regret that Tolstoy disavows his earlier work. The Critic · October 1898

Zangwill was arguing against Tolstoy’s late repudiation of his own novels: doctrine dates, art does not.

Scanned magazine page
The Critic, October 1898 — page 279
Quote Investigator: Every Dogma Has Its Day

Paper trail

  • 1865 — the half-formed version. The London Review of 16 December 1865 prints “every dog—not to say every dogma—has its day,” as documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1873 — the exact line, no name attached. The Washington Critic-Record of 1 April 1873 reports that decaying belief in certain articles of faith “has instigated a local merry-andrew to improve an old saying into ‘every dogma has its day’” (QI ↗; antedatings also posted to the American Dialect Society list ↗).
  • 1898 — the first name we can put to it. Israel Zangwill speaks the exact sentence at Tolstoy’s seventieth-birthday dinner in New York; the scanned October 1898 issue of The Critic ↗ carries it on page 279.
  • Modern day — the name that stuck. Burgess is credited on quote sites with no source; Wikiquote’s Burgess page ↗ does not carry the line at all.
Public domain

Every documented printing of this line predates 1931: the 1873 Critic-Record report, and Zangwill’s 1898 speech as published in The Critic (copyright 1898, The Critic Co.). Both are in the public domain in the United States, and the phrase itself has no identified author to hold rights in it.

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

Four names, none of them the author

This is a quote with a famous owner and no author. Here is who gets credit, and what each of them actually did.

Anthony Burgess Unsourced

Quote Investigator ↗ reports that Burgess wrote about dogmas but that the punning aphorism has not been located anywhere in the corpus of his works, and notes that BrainyQuote credits him with it. The line was in print in 1873, forty-four years before he was born.

Quote databases and social posts No source cited

Goodreads ↗ carries it under Burgess’s name with no book, essay or interview attached, above its own disclaimer that quotes are added by users and not verified.

Israel Zangwill Used it, didn’t coin it

Zangwill delivered the exact wording in his September 1898 Tolstoy-dinner speech, printed in The Critic that October ↗ — twenty-five years after the phrase was already in a newspaper.

Carolyn Wells Different sentence

In January 1898 the Des Moines Daily News credited Wells, writing in the Chap-Book, with “Every dogma must have its day” among her “Mixed Maxims,” as documented by Quote Investigator ↗. That is the variant, not the line quoted today.

The honest answer is that nobody knows who made the joke: Quote Investigator concludes the evidence points to an anonymous genesis ↗, with the first exact match — in the Washington Critic-Record of 1 April 1873 — ascribed only to a local “merry-andrew.”

Context

Why a Victorian joke ended up with a modern novelist

The pun works on a proverb that the Oxford English Dictionary traces to the 1500s — “every dog has his day” — and it needs only one letter to turn a consolation into a jab at belief. Someone worked that out in the 1860s: a London Review piece of December 1865 ↗ already had “every dog—not to say every dogma—has its day” in it, and by April 1873 a Washington paper was printing the finished form and crediting an unnamed local wit.

Lines like that travel without papers. A century later the quote databases needed a name to hang on it, and Anthony Burgess — English, bookish, quotable, dead since 1993 and therefore in no position to object — was a plausible fit. Burgess did write about dogmas. He does not appear to have written this.

The line is older than the man it is credited to — by forty-four years.

The 1898 sightings, in order

January 1898. The Des Moines Daily News ran a column of “Mixed Maxims” including “Every dogma must have its day,” credited to the light-verse writer Carolyn Wells in the Chap-Book — a variant, not the exact line, per Quote Investigator ↗.

September 1898. About a hundred covers were laid at the Hotel St. Denis in New York on Thursday evening, 8 September, for Tolstoy’s seventieth birthday. Zangwill, on his first American platform, used the exact wording while objecting that Tolstoy had disowned his own novels. The Critic printed the speech the following month ↗.

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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: Every Dogma Has Its Dayquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the 1865 precursor, the 1873 exact match, the 1898 Wells and Zangwill uses, and the finding that the line is not in Burgess’s corpus.
The Critic, October 1898 (Vol. 33, no. 856)archive.org

The scanned issue whose page 279 carries Zangwill’s Tolstoy-dinner speech with the exact sentence.
ADS-L: Aphorism — Every dogma has its day (1873, precursor 1865)listserv.linguistlist.org

The American Dialect Society list posting behind the investigation, with the antedatings laid out citation by citation.
Wikiquote: Anthony Burgessen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s Burgess page — the line appears nowhere on it, sourced or unsourced.
Goodreads: “Every dogma has its day.”goodreads.com

A live example of the bad attribution: credited to Burgess, no work cited, with the site’s own note that community quotes are unverified.
Israel Zangwillen.wikipedia.org

Background on the speaker of the best-documented 1898 use.

Not the coiner — the earliest named voice on record

The man with the receipt

Israel Zangwill

1864–1926 · British novelist, playwright & essayist

Israel Zangwill (21 January 1864 – 1 August 1926) was a British novelist and playwright best known for Children of the Ghetto (1892), the comic The King of Schnorrers (1894), and the play The Melting Pot (1908), which put that phrase into the American language. He was in New York in September 1898 — being heard by an American audience for the first time — when he told a room full of Tolstoy admirers that great art outlives doctrine, “every dogma has its day, just as every dog has.” He was not claiming the pun as his own: an exact match had already been printed twenty-five years earlier, credited to nobody in particular.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Chicago

Israel Zangwill, speech at the dinner for Leo Tolstoy’s seventieth birthday, Hotel St. Denis, New York, September 8, 1898, in “In Honor of Tolstoy,” The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art and Life 33, no. 856 (October 1898): 279. Earliest exact match documented in “Jottings About Town,” The Critic-Record (Washington, D.C.), April 1, 1873, 6, per Quote Investigator.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Every Dogma Has Its Day’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/every-dogma-has-its-day/

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