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Who really said it

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, but that would be boasting

Not Douglas Adams — actually Lewis Thomas Lewis Thomas 1913–1993 · American physician, biologist and essayist; president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute
Disputed In copyright

Douglas Adams never said it. The thought belongs to the physician-essayist Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Lives of a Cell (1974) that the first message humanity sent into space should be music: “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course.” The neater sentence everyone quotes — “the complete works … but that would be boasting” — is Carl Sagan’s rendering of a spoken Thomas remark, published in Murmurs of Earth (1978) and credited to Thomas by name.

Last verified 9 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, but that would be boasting” Lewis Thomas, not Douglas Adams. Thomas wrote "I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course" in The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 45. The familiar wording — "I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach … But that … would be boasting" — is Carl Sagan's paraphrase of a spoken Thomas remark in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (New York: Random House, 1978), 13. Chronology via Quote Investigator, 12 March 2024.

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by the estate of Lewis Thomas and Viking Press / Penguin Random House for The Lives of a Cell, and Random House for Murmurs of Earth). 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

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Provenance

Where the line actually comes from

Origin work
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Published
Viking Press, New York, 1974 — page 45
Popular wording
Carl Sagan et al., Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (Random House, 1978), page 13
Status
Genuine thought, paraphrased wording — and the wrong author on the label

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later. The Lives of a Cell, 1974

Notice what is not in the original: no “complete works,” no “boasting,” and “I would vote for” rather than “I would send.” The famous sentence is Sagan’s 1978 rendering of something Thomas said aloud, not of this written passage. (Quote Investigator places these lines on page 45, in the essay “Ceti”; Wikiquote files the identical passage under “Vibes.” Only Quote Investigator gives a page number and claims verification against scans, so that is the citation used here.)

Borrowable scan of the first edition
The Lives of a Cell (Viking Press, 1974) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the full 1974–2007 chronology

How the credit drifted

  • 1974 — Lewis Thomas publishes The Lives of a Cell, arguing that the safest opening message to send into space is music, and voting for “all of Bach.” The book goes on to win National Book Awards in two categories. Wikiquote carries the passage, sourced to the 1974 collection ↗
  • 1978 — Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, the book about the Voyager Golden Record, supplies the wording everyone now quotes — and credits it properly, naming “the biologist Lewis Thomas, president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute” and flagging his own version as “words to this effect.” Quote Investigator transcribes the page ↗
  • 1996–2007 — the name falls off. An obituary of Sagan quotes the line from an unnamed “biologist”; Stephen Fry credits Sagan on QI; then a forum post hands it to Douglas Adams. All three steps are documented and dated ↗
  • Meanwhile — three Bach selections really did fly, more than any other composer on the record: a Brandenburg Concerto movement, a violin gavotte, and a prelude and fugue played by Glenn Gould. Beethoven, the runner-up, got two. The full track list ↗
In copyright

Both candidate sources are modern books: The Lives of a Cell was published by Viking Press in 1974 and Murmurs of Earth by Random House in 1978. Whichever wording you quote, the underlying text is still in copyright — there is no public-domain route to this line, and short quotation with attribution is the ordinary way to use 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, one remark

This is an unusually crowded misattribution: Quote Investigator opens its investigation by listing four candidate speakers. Only one of them said it, and even he did not say it in these words.

Douglas Adams Never said it

Quote Investigator’s verdict is blunt: “Douglas Adams praised the music of Bach, but he did not make the statement under examination.” The earliest Adams credit it could document is a 2007 post on a trumpet players’ forum — more than thirty years after Thomas wrote the line. Adams was a real Bach enthusiast, which is likely why the credit stuck: he wrote a newspaper appreciation of the Brandenburg Concertos in 1999 containing the line “Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” That is his. This one is not. Quote Investigator’s findings ↗ Worth noting too: Wikiquote’s Douglas Adams page ↗ runs to roughly 38,000 characters and contains no Bach quotation whatsoever.

Carl Sagan Quoted it, didn’t coin it

Sagan is the reason the pithy version exists, but he never claimed it. In Murmurs of Earth he introduces it as “an earlier remark of the biologist Lewis Thomas” and marks his own phrasing as approximate. Stephen Fry nonetheless credited Sagan for it on an episode of the BBC panel show QI in 2004, in the variant “I think that would just be showing off.” Both citations are dated at Quote Investigator ↗

Lewis Thomas — but not verbatim Paraphrase

Thomas is the right author of the idea, and the quotable sentence is a fair summary of him. It is still not a sentence he is documented as writing. What he wrote was “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course.” Sagan compressed a spoken version into “the complete works … but that would be boasting,” and that compression is what travelled. Wikiquote’s sourced text of the original ↗

The joke is Lewis Thomas’s, the phrasing is Carl Sagan’s, and Douglas Adams simply had the misfortune of being famous, funny and fond of Bach. Quote Investigator, 12 March 2024 ↗

Context

Why it mattered

When Thomas wrote this, the Voyager probes had not yet launched. He was thinking about a colder problem — the conference-room question of what electromagnetic message humanity should beam at a civilisation that might be a century or more away, and might not reply for two hundred years. His answer was that anything we said about ourselves in words would embarrass us by the time it arrived, and that music was the one language likely to survive the trip with its meaning intact.

The joke lands because it concedes the whole game in half a sentence. Sending all of Bach is an act of self-flattery, and Thomas knows it, and does it anyway — “it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.” That last clause is the part nobody quotes, and it is the part that makes the line more than a quip.

We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance.

What actually went on the record

Thomas did not get the complete works. When the Golden Record was assembled for the two Voyager probes launched in 1977, Bach got three slots: the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 with the Munich Bach Orchestra under Karl Richter, the Gavotte en Rondeau from the Partita for Solo Violin No. 3 played by Arthur Grumiaux, and the Prelude and Fugue in C from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier played by Glenn Gould.

That is more than any other composer — Beethoven, next in line, got two. So Thomas lost the argument on volume, in the sense that nobody was ever going to fit the complete works onto a twelve-inch disc, and won it on every other count: Bach is the most-represented composer up there. The remark, meanwhile, outlived the debate by being repeatedly handed to the wrong person.

Explore

Filed under

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

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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 Investigator: All of Bach, Streamed Out Into Spacequoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation. Dated citations from 1974 to 2007, transcriptions of both books verified against scans, and an explicit ruling on the Adams, Sagan and Fry credits.
Wikiquote: Lewis Thomasen.wikiquote.org

Carries the original 1974 passage in full under The Lives of a Cell, so you can compare Thomas’s actual words against the version in circulation.
The Lives of a Cell (Viking Press, 1974)archive.org

A borrowable scan of the first edition — the book the line comes from, with the publisher and year matching Quote Investigator’s citation.
Murmurs of Earth (Random House, 1978)archive.org

Sagan’s book about the Golden Record, where the famous wording first appears in print, credited to Thomas. This is the Random House first edition cited above for page 13 — borrow-only. (The Archive’s other copy is the 1979 Ballantine paperback reprint, whose page numbering differs.)
Contents of the Voyager Golden Recorden.wikipedia.org

The full track list, showing exactly which three Bach pieces made the cut. (NASA’s own Golden Record pages are currently dead.)
Wikiquote: Douglas Adamsen.wikiquote.org

Check for yourself: a long, well-sourced collection of Adams quotations that contains no Bach line and no “boasting” anywhere.

The man who actually said it

Who was Lewis Thomas?

Lewis Thomas

1913–1993 · American physician and biologist · president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute

Lewis Thomas was an American physician and biologist who doubled as one of the finest essayists of his generation — his encyclopedia entry needs eight nouns to cover him, among them poet, etymologist, administrator and educator. He served as president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, and his 1974 collection The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher won National Book Awards in two separate categories, Arts and Letters and the Sciences. He wrote about biology the way a good host talks at dinner: warmly, briefly, and with the confidence to make a joke at the species’ expense.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 45. The familiar wording appears in Carl Sagan, Frank D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman Sagan, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (New York: Random House, 1978), 13, where Sagan presents it as a paraphrase of a spoken remark by Thomas. Chronology per Quote Investigator, “All of Bach, Streamed Out Into Space, Over and Over Again. We Would Be Bragging,” 12 March 2024.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, but that would be boasting’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-would-send-the-complete-works-of-johann-sebastian-bach/

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