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Who really said it

Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth

Attributed to Archimedes c. 287 – c. 212 BC · Greek mathematician, physicist & engineer of Syracuse
The idea is well attested in antiquity and consistent with his proven work — but the famous wording is a later writer’s formulation, not a line we can trace to Archimedes’ own pen. Free to reuse

Archimedes almost certainly made this boast — ancient writers report it independently, and it follows directly from the law of the lever he actually proved. But no surviving work of his contains the line. The Greek we quote — δός μοι ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν — is first securely attested in Pappus of Alexandria’s Synagoge, Book VIII, around AD 340, roughly 550 years after Archimedes died. An earlier witness survives: Diodorus Siculus (c. 60–30 BC) records the boast in different Doric Greek, and the familiar “place to stand” phrasing there is F. R. Walton’s 1957 English, not Diodorus’s Greek. The thought is Archimedes’; the wording is Pappus’s.

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth” attributed to Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC). No surviving work of Archimedes contains the line; its earliest known wording is in Pappus of Alexandria, Synagoge, Book VIII, c. AD 340. Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

Where the words actually come from

Earliest wording in
Synagoge (Collection), Book VIII
Written by
Pappus of Alexandria, c. AD 340 — roughly 550 years after Archimedes died
Greek
δός μοι ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν
Greek text in
F. Hultsch, ed., Pappus Alexandrinus: Collectio (1876–78), vol. 3, book 8, section 10, ix — the edition reference Today in Science History cites ↗ for the Pappus attribution.
Translation
Common English rendering; closely matches Sir Thomas Heath, Archimedes (1920), “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.”

δός μοι ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν

“Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.” Reported speech, c. AD 340

There is no fuller passage to quote. Pappus preserves the line as a bare epigram, with no narrative around it — which is part of why it reads so cleanly, and part of why it can’t be traced further back. For the boast in context you have to go to Plutarch, who tells the story of King Hiero and the ship but renders the punchline in completely different words.

Heath, Archimedes (1920) — the English rendering, at Project Gutenberg

How we verified this

  • c. 212 BC — Archimedes dies at the fall of Syracuse. Nothing in his surviving corpus, including On the Equilibrium of Planes (where he proves the law of the lever that makes the boast work), contains this line or anything like it.
  • c. 60 – 30 BC — Diodorus Siculus records the boast in Doric Greek — Πᾷ βῶ, καὶ χαριστίωνι τὰν γᾶν κινήσω πᾶσαν — in the Fragments of Book XXVI ↗. This is the earliest surviving witness to the boast, but it reaches us only at second hand: Book XXVI is lost, preserved in later Byzantine excerpts. Its familiar English — “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world” — is F. R. Walton’s 1957 Loeb rendering, not Diodorus’s Greek.
  • c. AD 100 — Plutarch gives the fullest early account of the boast in Life of Marcellus 14.7 ↗ — and the earliest one preserved in continuous transmission rather than through excerptors — but in indirect speech and different words: Archimedes “declared that, if there were another world, and he could go to it, he could move this.”
  • c. AD 340 — Pappus of Alexandria records the epigram we now quote, in Synagoge Book VIII. This is the earliest secure attestation of this Greek wording, and Pappus is the source St Andrews’ MacTutor archive credits ↗, though without naming the book.
  • 12th century — John Tzetzes repeats the Doric version in Chiliades II.130.
Public domain

Both halves of this are safely out of copyright. The Greek is Pappus’s, c. AD 340, and the standard scholarly text is Hultsch’s Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis (Berlin, 1876–78) — long in the public domain. The English wording shown closely follows Sir Thomas Heath’s rendering in Archimedes (1920) ↗, published well before 1931 and free at Project Gutenberg. The delta is one word each way: Heath has “a place to stand on… and I can move the earth”; the popular modern form drops the “on” and uses “I shall.” Neither is in copyright. One caution: not every translation of this line is free. F. R. Walton’s “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world,” from the Loeb Diodorus Siculus (1957), is a distinct and much later translation — quote that wording and you are quoting an in-copyright text, not this one.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

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 problem isn’t who — it’s the wording

Nobody credible disputes that Archimedes made this boast. What gets misrepresented is the idea that these are his words, quoted from something he wrote. They aren’t — and the version most people know has picked up hardware along the way that isn’t in any ancient text.

Pappus of Alexandria, c. AD 340 — not Archimedes Not from his pen

No surviving work of Archimedes contains the line. It appears as a standalone epigram in Pappus’s Synagoge, Book VIII, some 550 years after his death — the citation Wikiquote gives for it ↗. Today in Science History flags such sayings as likely restatements by later writers ↗.

Plutarch, c. AD 100 Different words

The oldest surviving witness to the boast doesn’t use this phrasing at all. Life of Marcellus 14.7 ↗ reports it in indirect speech: Archimedes “declared that, if there were another world, and he could go to it, he could move this.” No place to stand, no lever, no epigram.

Modern quote aggregators Embellishment

AZQuotes circulates ↗ “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world” with no citation attached — while giving a source for the plainer version on the same page. “Long enough” is not in the Greek.

Modern quote sites Not in the Greek

Quotepark presents this wording ↗ as a translation of the Doric “δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω.” That Greek contains no word for fulcrum — it says only give me where to stand and I will move the earth. The fulcrum was added in English.

The boast is genuinely Archimedean and the physics behind it is genuinely his. But the words are Pappus’s, written nearly two and a half centuries after Plutarch and five and a half after Archimedes — and the lever and fulcrum most people quote were bolted on much later still. Heath’s 1920 rendering ↗ is the honest short form: “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.”

Context

Why the boast was more than bravado

It sounds like showmanship, and it was — but it was showmanship backed by a proof. In On the Equilibrium of Planes, Archimedes had established the law of the lever: weights balance at distances inversely proportional to them. The uncomfortable corollary is that there is no upper bound. Given a long enough arm and a fixed fulcrum, any force moves any weight. The earth is just a very large number in an equation that does not care how large the number is.

Plutarch sets the scene: King Hiero of Syracuse, told that any weight could be shifted by any force, demanded a demonstration. Archimedes is said to have single-handedly hauled a fully laden ship out of the harbour using a compound pulley. The boast was the theorem’s punchline — the mathematician pointing out that the only thing stopping him from moving the planet was real estate.

The only thing missing was somewhere to stand.

So why can’t you actually do it?

The physics is sound but the engineering is absurd, and the absurdity is the point — it is what makes the line a joke rather than a proposal. To shift the earth any perceptible distance you would need a lever arm on the order of light-years, a fulcrum that does not itself move, and a lifetime spent pushing to achieve a displacement smaller than an atom.

Archimedes knew this. The counterfactual framing in Plutarch — if there were another world, and he could go to it — is doing exactly that work. He is not claiming he can move the earth. He is claiming his mathematics has no ceiling, and inviting you to notice that the only obstacle left is the absence of a second planet to stand on.

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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.

Archimedesen.wikiquote.org

The anchor source. Lists the quote in its main Quotes section with the Doric Greek, citing Pappus (Synagoge VIII, c. AD 340) and Tzetzes (Chiliades II.130), plus four variant translations.
Archimedes (1920), full textgutenberg.org

Sir Thomas Heath's study, in the public domain. Gives the Greek and renders it "Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth" — the pre-1931 English wording closest to the popular line.
Plutarch, Life of Marcelluspenelope.uchicago.edu

The fullest early account of the boast, c. AD 100 (Perrin's Loeb translation, 1917). Chapter 14.7 has Archimedes claim he could move the earth from another world — and contains no "place to stand."
Diodorus Siculus, Book XXVI fragmentspenelope.uchicago.edu

Diodorus wrote c. 60–30 BC, so this is the earliest surviving witness to the boast — though Book XXVI reaches us only through later Byzantine excerptors. Fragment 18.1 in F. R. Walton's Loeb translation (1957): "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world" — the variant Wikiquote traces to a source earlier than Pappus. The Doric Greek is different: Πᾷ βῶ, καὶ χαριστίωνι τὰν γᾶν κινήσω πᾶσαν.
Quotations by Archimedesmathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk

The St Andrews MacTutor archive gives "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth" and sources it to On the lever in Pappus's Synagoge.
Archimedes Quotationstodayinsci.com

Sets out both the classical and Doric Greek forms, cites Hultsch's edition of Pappus, and cautions that these sayings are likely restatements by later writers rather than Archimedes's actual words.

The man who could have moved it

Archimedes of Syracuse

Archimedes

c. 287 – c. 212 BC · Greek mathematician, physicist & engineer of Syracuse

Archimedes of Syracuse was antiquity’s most formidable mathematician — the man who calculated π, founded hydrostatics, and in On the Equilibrium of Planes gave the first rigorous proof of the law of the lever. That proof is what makes the boast credible: he had shown that any weight can be balanced by any force, given enough distance. He was killed by a Roman soldier at the fall of Syracuse in 212 BC, reportedly while working a geometry problem in the dust.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Pappus of Alexandria. Synagoge (Collection), Book VIII, c. AD 340. Greek text in Friedrich Otto Hultsch, ed., Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis quae supersunt (Berlin, 1876–78), vol. 3, p. 1060. English rendering as in Sir Thomas Heath, Archimedes (1920): “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.” Earlier witness to the boast in different words: Plutarch, Life of Marcellus 14.7, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library (1917).

MLA (9th ed.)

Pappus of Alexandria. Synagoge (Collection). Book 8, edited by Friedrich Otto Hultsch, vol. 3, 1876-78, p. 1060.

APA (7th ed.)

Pappus of Alexandria. (1876-1878). Pappi Alexandrini collectionis quae supersunt (F. O. Hultsch, Ed.; Vol. 3). (Original work published ca. 340 CE)

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/give-me-a-place-to-stand-and-i-shall-move-the-earth/

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