Haley really did use it — it was his personal motto, embossed on his stationery and later placed on the emblem of the cutter named for him — but he did not coin it. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the earliest exact match to a superintendent’s report written by Madison Babcock in the 1896 annual report of the San Francisco public schools, and tentatively credits him.
“Find the good and praise it” earliest documented exact match: Madison Babcock, superintendent's report, Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City and County of San Francisco, 1896, p. 186 (per Quote Investigator). Alex Haley adopted it as his personal motto; he said he found it on a bumper sticker. Via Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Alex Haley. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
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In context
Evoking the world of Madison Babcock — author of the 1896 superintendent's report. Theme: "Find the good and praise it". 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 "Find the good and praise it". 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 earliest documented appearance
Work
Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City and County of San Francisco for the School and Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1896
Written by
Madison Babcock, in the superintendent’s report
Page
186 (per Quote Investigator)
Popularised by
Alex Haley, Parade, 21 November 1982 — as “Find the good—and praise it”
Don’t label your class ‘the meanest in school.’ If you do, it will strive to live up to the reputation you give it. Be not as some teachers who speak only to snarl at faults. Find the good and praise it, speak sparingly of the bad. None of us desire our wrong deeds oft spoken of; we are always better for the kindly words of our good actions.
1896 · advice to teachers
As transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from the 1896 report. Note the original is advice to teachers, and the famous half-line is the middle of a longer sentence.
1896 — earliest exact match: Madison Babcock’s superintendent’s report in the San Francisco public schools annual report, per Quote Investigator ↗, which tentatively credits him.
1982 — Alex Haley writes in Parade that he has “Find the good—and praise it” printed on his stationery; a January 1985 Knoxville News-Sentinel profile says he first saw it on a bumper sticker in Los Angeles (both documented by QI ↗).
1995 — Wikiquote ↗ records the fuller Haley sentence “In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it,” cited to A Kwanzaa Celebration (1995), p. 154.
The wording pinned here comes from an 1896 municipal school report published in the United States — well before 1931 — so that text is in the public domain. Alex Haley’s own later writings that carry the phrase, such as his 1982 Parade piece, remain in copyright to his estate and publishers; nothing from those is quoted here beyond the bare motto.
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.
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Fact-check
How Haley’s name got attached
This is a credit problem rather than a fabrication. The wording is real, the man who made it famous really used it, and he was candid about not having invented it — the “— Alex Haley” tag simply hardened around a motto he had borrowed.
✕
The name on almost every graphicAlex Haley populariser, not author
Genuine user of the line: he wrote in Parade in November 1982 that he had it printed on his stationery, and it is on the emblem of the cutter named for him. But a January 1985 Knoxville News-Sentinel profile records that he found the saying on a bumper sticker in Los Angeles, and Quote Investigator ↗ finds it in print in 1896.
✕
The fallback credit“Anonymous” / “old proverb” undersells the record
Collections that drop Haley often replace him with nothing at all. There is a documented print trail: Quote Investigator ↗ records the 1896 exact match and related nineteenth- and twentieth-century wordings rather than an untraceable proverb.
✓Alex Haley’s motto — not Alex Haley’s sentence. The earliest exact match Quote Investigator ↗ can find is Madison Babcock’s 1896 superintendent’s report, and it credits him tentatively.
Context
Why this one travels under the wrong name
A quote does not need to be fabricated to be misattributed. Alex Haley really did live by this one: he had “Find the good—and praise it” printed across the bottom of his personal stationery, wrote about it in Parade in November 1982, and told an interviewer he tried to do exactly that in his books. When the Coast Guard named a cutter after him in 1999 — he had served twenty years in the service — the phrase went onto the ship’s emblem as his motto.
What none of that establishes is authorship. In a 1985 Knoxville News-Sentinel profile, Haley said he had come across the saying on a bumper sticker while in Los Angeles and liked it enough to have it embossed on his stationery. The line was already in print long before that: Quote Investigator ↗ found it in an 1896 San Francisco school report, addressed to teachers tempted to define a class by its worst behaviour.
He adopted it, he lived by it, and he said plainly where he got it — a bumper sticker.
Related wordings Quote Investigator also documents
Quote Investigator notes the sentiment’s kinship with Ephesians 4:29, and records the Scottish literary scholar William Paton Ker writing in The Times Literary Supplement in 1919 that “the real task of criticism is to find out the good and praise it rightly.”
The same article records Jesse Owens in his 1970 book Blackthink: “Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it.” These are relatives of the phrase rather than its source.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
San Francisco public schools · author of the 1896 superintendent’s report
Madison Babcock wrote the superintendent’s report in the Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City and County of San Francisco for the year ending 30 June 1896 — the earliest exact appearance of this line that Quote Investigator has been able to locate. He wrote it as practical advice to teachers about how to talk to and about their pupils, not as an inspirational slogan. Beyond that report very little about him is readily documented, and Quote Investigator credits him only tentatively; the phrase became famous a century later through Alex Haley, who adopted it as his motto.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Madison Babcock, “Superintendent’s Report,” in Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City and County of San Francisco for the School and Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1896 (San Francisco, 1896), 186. Earliest exact match documented by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Find the Good and Praise It,” 25 February 2022.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Find the good and praise it’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/find-the-good-and-praise-it/