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Who really said it

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers

Written by Mignon McLaughlin 1913–1983 · American journalist, magazine editor and aphorist
Verified In copyright

The line is an aphorism by Mignon McLaughlin, published in The Neurotic’s Notebook (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963), chapter 7, page 72 — a citation Quote Investigator verified with scans ↗. Wayne Dyer quoted a reworded version of it decades later; a 1999 newspaper reviewer credited that version to him, and the mistake stuck.

Last verified 14 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers” Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook (1963), p. 72 — frequently misattributed to Wayne Dyer and Marshall McLuhan

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Mignon McLaughlin and the successors to The Bobbs-Merrill Company). 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 Mignon McLaughlin — American journalist, magazine editor and aphorist. Theme: "Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers". 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.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers". 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 documented source

Work
The Neurotic’s Notebook
Author
Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983)
Published
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis, 1963 — ch. 7, p. 72
Popularly credited to
Wayne Dyer — and, separately, Marshall McLuhan. Both incorrect.

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. Chapter 7: Politics, Arts, Professions

The Neurotic’s Notebook is a collection of standalone aphorisms, not continuous prose — so this line has no surrounding sentence to quote. It sits as a single entry among the epigrams of chapter 7, which Quote Investigator places on page 72 ↗. Note the comma after “conformists” in the 1963 text; most circulating versions drop it.

Scanned first edition (Internet Archive)
The Neurotic's Notebook, Bobbs-Merrill, 1963
Quote Investigator: tracing the line to McLaughlin's 1963 original

How we verified this

In copyright

The line was first published in The Neurotic’s Notebook in 1963 — well after the 1931 public-domain cutoff — so it should be treated as in copyright in the United States, not as a free-floating proverb. That the quote circulates unattributed on hundreds of quote sites has no bearing on its status: it is a short, identifiable literary aphorism by a named author with a named publisher. Quotle quotes it here briefly for identification and commentary.

Fact-check

How Wayne Dyer ended up with it

This aphorism has drifted onto two famous men — one through a remark he made aloud to a reviewer, one possibly through a near-identical surname. Its actual author, a Glamour managing editor who died in 1983, is the one name most quote sites leave off.

Wayne Dyer Via a 1999 remark

Dyer’s Wisdom of the Ages (HarperCollins, 1998) was built around reflections on other people’s wisdom — which is exactly the kind of book that leaks quotations onto its author. Quote Investigator notes that a 1999 Gannett News Service reviewer quoted Dyer saying a variant of the line ↗ and readers took the speaker for the source. Dyer was born in 1940 — he was a young man when the line was already in print, and his own Wikiquote page contains no such quote at all ↗.

Marshall McLuhan Mechanism uncertain

The more widespread error online. Quote Investigator tracks McLuhan misattributions from 2004 to 2016 and suggests the mechanism may be confusion between “McLaughlin” and “McLuhan” ↗. The split is still visible in the wild: Goodreads hosts the same sentence under McLuhan ↗ and under McLaughlin ↗ as two separate entries, neither citing a source.

“Society honors its living conformists…” Variant

The version attached to Dyer is not McLaughlin’s sentence. Quote Investigator records the Dyer-quoted form as “Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers” ↗ — dropping “Every,” swapping “live” for “living.” QI also documents other drifting forms, including “The world values live conformists and dead rebels” and “Every age honours its dead rebels and living conformists.”

Quote Investigator’s conclusion is unambiguous ↗: “Mignon McLaughlin should receive credit for the expression she crafted in her 1963 book. Neither Marshall McLuhan nor Wayne Dyer created this saying.”

Context

Why this one drifted

Aphorism collections are the most attribution-fragile literature there is. A book like The Neurotic’s Notebook is ninety-six pages of unsourced one-liners with no argument around them to anchor a line to its author — every sentence is already formatted for the clipboard. Lift one out and nothing about it says “McLaughlin.” It just says quotable.

So the sentence went looking for a bigger name, and found two. Marshall McLuhan may have got it on a surname near-miss — Quote Investigator says the mechanism is uncertain. Wayne Dyer got it the way self-help authors usually do: he said it aloud to a reviewer in 1999, while promoting a book explicitly devoted to passing along other people’s wisdom, and the reviewer wrote down the man in front of him rather than the woman behind the line. Neither error required bad faith — only the ordinary friction of a good sentence moving faster than its citation.

The line survived. The byline did not.

A note on the comma

McLaughlin’s 1963 text carries a comma before the final clause — “Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers” — and that comma is doing real work. It puts a beat of hesitation before the turn, so “and its dead troublemakers” lands as an afterthought that detonates the first half of the sentence.

Nearly every version in circulation drops it, including the entry on Wikiquote ↗. It is a small loss, but it is the kind of erosion that marks a quotation’s distance from its page.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Character

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 Origin: Every Society Honors Its Live Conformists, and Its Dead Troublemakersquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation and this page's anchor. Gives the 1963 McLaughlin citation (ch. 7, p. 72, verified with scans), the 1999 Gannett review that credited Dyer, the McLuhan misattributions of 2004–2016, and the documented variants.
Mignon McLaughlin — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line among McLaughlin's aphorisms, under The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), in the page's 'Unclassified' subsection.
The Neurotic's Notebook (Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) — scanned editionarchive.org

The Internet Archive's copy of the first edition that contains the line. Catalog record confirms Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1963, 96 pages. The scan is lending-restricted, so the text is not searchable without borrowing.
Mignon McLaughlin — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the actual author: 1913–1983, American journalist, wrote for Redbook, Cosmopolitan and Vogue, was copy editor then managing editor at Glamour, retired 1973.
Goodreads: the same line filed under Marshall McLuhangoodreads.com

The misattribution, live. Goodreads carries this quote under McLuhan with no source cited, alongside a separate duplicate entry crediting McLaughlin.
Wayne Dyer — Quote Investigator tag indexquoteinvestigator.com

QI's index of quotations investigated in connection with Wayne Dyer; this saying is one of three listed, alongside 'Change the Way You Look at Things' and 'Life Is Not a Rehearsal'.

The actual author

Who was Mignon McLaughlin?

Mignon McLaughlin

1913–1983 · American journalist, magazine editor and aphorist

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) was an American journalist who spent her career inside the mid-century magazine world — writing short stories for Redbook and Cosmopolitan, working at Vogue, and serving as copy editor and then managing editor of Glamour before retiring in 1973. Beginning in the 1950s she published the terse, mordant aphorisms that were later gathered into three collections known as the Neurotic’s Notebook books. Her epigrams travel far better than her name does: several of her best-known lines now circulate under more famous bylines, and this is one of them.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963), chapter 7 (“Politics, Arts, Professions”), 72. Earliest documented instance per Quote Investigator ↗, which reports the page verified with scans.

MLA (9th ed.)

McLaughlin, Mignon. The Neurotic’s Notebook. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963, p. 72.

APA (7th ed.)

McLaughlin, M. (1963). The neurotic’s notebook. The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/every-society-honors-its-live-conformists-and-its-dead

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