I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything
Not Disraeli — actually Lord MelbourneWilliam Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne1779–1848 · British Prime Minister; the barb was aimed at Thomas Babington Macaulay
Disraeli almost certainly never said it. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the quip to Lord Melbourne, who aimed it at the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, famous for being certain about everything — a partial version was in print by 1839 and the first strong match by 1851. The Disraeli-to-Gladstone telling appears only in 1944, in Bennett Cerf’s joke book Try and Stop Me. Melbourne’s exact words are not recoverable: the line survives in half a dozen competing Victorian wordings, and the popular modern form simply swaps a generic “he” for “Tom Macaulay.”
“I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything” attributed to Lord Melbourne (1779–1848), quoted in Earl Cowper's preface to Lord Melbourne's Papers (1889). Commonly misattributed to Benjamin Disraeli; that version first appears in Bennett Cerf's Try and Stop Me (1944). Verified via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I wish I was as cock-sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Benjamin Disraeli. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The primary text
Credited to
Lord Melbourne (William Lamb), by Quote Investigator
Target of the jibe
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Earliest strong match
Graham’s Magazine, August 1851
Verified in print
Lord Melbourne’s Papers, 1889
It was Lord Melbourne, not Sydney Smith, who said, ‘I wish I was as cock-sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything’; but we see now that he had had his own period of cock-sureness like most other people.
1889 preface
Earl Cowper’s preface to Lord Melbourne’s Papers (1889), confirmed in the Internet Archive scan ↗; Quote Investigator gives the page as xii. The wording closest to the popular modern form is the 7 January 1860 Illustrated London News, transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ as: “I wish that I was as sure of any one thing as—Tom Macaulay is sure of everything”.
1839 — Quote Investigator ↗ finds an incomplete version in The Quarterly Review, credited to Melbourne but with no target named: “He’s clever enough; but I don’t like those fellows that are always cock-sure of everything.”
1851 — the first strong match, in Graham’s Magazine, introduces it as Melbourne’s hit at Macaulay’s “universal dogmatism”: “I wish that I knew any thing as well as Tom Macaulay knows every thing.” See the chronology ↗
1860 — ten days after Macaulay’s death on 28 December 1859, the 7 January Illustrated London News prints the wording closest to today’s, as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗.
1889 — Earl Cowper puts it on the record in his preface to Lord Melbourne’s Papers, correcting the rival credit to Sydney Smith. Read the scan ↗
✓Public domain
Every documented printing of this remark is Victorian and long out of copyright in the United States: the 1851 Graham’s Magazine notice, the 7 January 1860 Illustrated London News item, and Earl Cowper’s 1889 preface to Lord Melbourne’s Papers ↗, whose Internet Archive scan records no visible copyright notice. The popular modern wording is simply the 1860 sentence with “Tom Macaulay” replaced by “he,” so no copyrightable modern authorship attaches to 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
A joke with a revolving door of authors
Almost no quotation has been reassigned as often as this one. Quote Investigator collects at least five different claimants across 125 years of printing, and Benjamin Disraeli is the latest arrival, not the original.
✕
The popular credit todayBenjamin Disraeli First seen 1944
Bennett Cerf’s Try and Stop Me (1944) stages the line as a debating-chamber comeback: Gladstone thunders that Disraeli cannot be sure of his facts, and Disraeli replies that he wishes he could be as sure of anything as his opponent is of everything. Quote Investigator ↗ records the anecdote but does not credit the attribution — the remark had been in print under Melbourne’s name since 1851, and Disraeli had been dead since 1881. Wikiquote’s Disraeli page ↗ carries no version of it.
✕
The Victorian rival claimSydney Smith 1884
A System of Rhetoric (1884) gave a version to the clergyman-wit Sydney Smith. Five years later Earl Cowper corrected the record in his preface to Lord Melbourne’s Papers ↗, writing that it was Melbourne, not Smith, who said it.
✕
An earlier stray creditWilliam Windham 1882
Samuel Arthur Bent’s Short Sayings of Great Men (1882) assigned the line to the politician William Windham, per Quote Investigator ↗. Ralph Keyes flagged the same claim in The Quote Verifier.
✕
The target-and-speaker swapMacaulay himself, about Lord Brougham 1964
In The Fine Art of Political Wit (1964), Adlai Stevenson is recorded believing that Macaulay said it — about Brougham — which inverts the joke entirely, since Macaulay was the man being mocked. See the citation ↗.
✓On current evidence Quote Investigator ↗ gives priority to Lord Melbourne, with Macaulay as the target — while noting honestly that several wordings circulate and it is not certain which one Melbourne actually used.
Context
Why Macaulay was the obvious target
Thomas Babington Macaulay was the most confident man in Victorian public life. His History of England sold like a novel and his essays settled questions other people were still arguing about, in prose that never once sounded unsure. Contemporaries found this exhilarating and slightly maddening — the 1851 Graham’s Magazine notice that carries the first strong version of this quip introduces it as a comment on Macaulay’s “universal dogmatism.”
Melbourne was the perfect man to puncture it. A sceptic who governed without much conviction that governing changed anything, he had exactly the temperament to find total certainty comic. The joke then did what good jokes do: it detached from its author. Within a generation it was being handed to Sydney Smith, to William Windham, and eventually — once the Disraeli-versus-Gladstone rivalry became the standard stage for any British political zinger — to Disraeli.
The line outlived everyone in it, and kept changing whose mouth it was in.
How the wording drifted
The versions Quote Investigator collects are not small variants of one sentence. In 1851 it is “I wish that I knew any thing as well as Tom Macaulay knows every thing.” In January 1860 it is “I wish that I was as sure of any one thing as—Tom Macaulay is sure of everything.” In 1865 and again in 1889 the word is “cocksure.” QI is explicit that it is not certain which wording Melbourne actually used.
The modern form — “I wish I was as sure of any one thing as he is of everything” — is the 1860 wording with the name filed off. That generic “he” is what made the line portable enough to be reassigned to Disraeli in 1944 and, in one 1964 retelling by Adlai Stevenson, to Macaulay himself speaking about Lord Brougham.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1779–1848 · British Prime Minister and Queen Victoria’s first political mentor
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne was a Whig statesman who served as Prime Minister briefly in 1834 and again from 1835 to 1841, and who spent hours a day tutoring the young Queen Victoria in statecraft. He was a famous sceptic in an age of enthusiasts — languid, worldly, allergic to certainty — which is exactly why the jibe fits him. His one lasting contribution to the dictionary of quotations is a complaint about somebody else’s confidence, and even that survives only secondhand, in other people’s memoirs and prefaces.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best-available primary
Earl Cowper, preface to Lord Melbourne’s Papers, ed. Lloyd C. Sanders (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), xii. Earliest strong match documented by Quote Investigator: “The Use and the Economy of Invective,” Graham’s Magazine 39, no. 2 (August 1851): 66.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-wish-i-was-as-sure-of-any-one-thing-as-he-is-of-everything/