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Who really said it

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality

Not Lewis Carroll — actually Benjamin De Casseres Benjamin De Casseres 1873–1945 · American essayist, critic and poet
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Quote Investigator credits the American essayist Benjamin De Casseres, who used the thought in an essay on Shelley published in The Poetry Journal in 1916: “In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination.” The tight modern sentence is a later compression of that — by 1966 it was being printed as a dictionary definition — and the credit drifted along the way, first to the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier in a 1935 Reader’s Digest filler, then, in the 2010s, to Lewis Carroll and to C. S. Lewis.

Last verified 17 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality” Not Lewis Carroll. The thought is Benjamin De Casseres, "Shelley", The Poetry Journal, 1916 — "In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination." The shorter sentence is a later rewrite. Traced by Quotle.info

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

Can you use it?

We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin De Casseres — American journalist, critic, essayist & poet. Theme: "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality". 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 "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality". 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 1916 original

Author
Benjamin De Casseres
First published in
The Poetry Journal
Issue
Volume 6, Number 1 (July 1916), essay “Shelley”, quote page 20 — per Quote Investigator
Reprinted
Forty Immortals (1926), chapter “Shelley”, page 172 — per Quote Investigator
The compressed wording
No identified author; in this shape by the 1960s

“In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination. The ethereal imagination is the highest form of the evolution of the transfiguring and sublimating power of images. It marks the boundary line between the mystery of matter and the mystery of spirit.” Extract

Quote Investigator’s transcription of the 1916 passage. We could not read the scan ourselves — Google Books is blocked by our network policy — so this excerpt rests on QI’s transcription rather than on our own sight of the page, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.

Quote Investigator: In the Sublime War of Humanity Against Reality

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s article ↗ is the anchor and its conclusion is explicit: “Benjamin De Casseres penned this saying in an essay published in The Poetry Journal in 1916. QI believes De Casseres deserves credit for this saying.” It gives the full citation — Volume 6, Number 1, essay “Shelley”, quote page 20 — and transcribes the passage.
  • We could not open that scan. Google Books is blocked from this machine by our network policy, and we could not find either the 1916 journal or the 1926 reprint Forty Immortals on the Internet Archive. So this record adopts QI’s transcription and citation and adds nothing to them — no edition detail, no page number of our own, no claim to have read it.
  • The wording drift is documented step by step in the same article ↗. A January 1935 Reader’s Digest filler printed “In the war against Reality man has but one weapon — Imagination” and credited Jules de Gaultier, an attribution QI conjectures was never checked; Leonard Louis Levinson’s The Left Handed Dictionary compressed it further in 1966 to “IMAGINATION. The one weapon in the war against reality”; the modern “only weapon” sentence follows from there. Carroll enters in October 2012, in a tweet crediting “Alice in Wonderland”.
  • We downloaded the Project Gutenberg texts of ten of Carroll’s English books — 2.41 million characters — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ↗ (in two editions), Through the Looking-Glass ↗, The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, Three Sunsets and Other Poems, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, A Tangled Tale, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic — flattened every line break so no phrase could hide across a line ending, and searched the lot. “only weapon”, “war against reality” and “imagination is the only” each occur zero times. A site-wide insource: search of Wikiquote for “war against reality” returns one page, and it is an unrelated modern author — not Carroll’s page ↗.

No rights badge, and the reason is specific. De Casseres’s 1916 essay was published well before 1931 and is out of copyright in the United States — but the sentence quoted here is not that essay’s sentence. It is an anonymous later compression with no identifiable author and no first publication we could date, so there is no work whose status we can honestly attach to the line as people quote 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

Often misattributed

This line has been handed to four different people in a century, and only the first one has any evidence behind him.

Benjamin De Casseres Genuine, but not this wording

QI credits him ↗ for the saying, from his 1916 Shelley essay. What he wrote was longer and grander: “In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination.”

Lewis Carroll, or the Cheshire Cat, in Alice in Wonderland Refuted

First seen in an October 2012 tweet crediting “Alice in Wonderland”, per QI ↗, and repeated in a 2016 business book as something the Cheshire Cat says. The phrase occurs in none of the ten Carroll books we searched.

C. S. Lewis Refuted

A December 2012 tweet, logged by QI ↗. Two fantasy authors called Lewis, both credited in the same year, neither with a source.

Jules de Gaultier Refuted

A January 1935 Reader’s Digest filler item credited the French philosopher, and newspapers copied it out for decades. QI conjectures ↗ the filler was sent in by a reader and never verified — the saying had already been in print under De Casseres’s name for nearly twenty years.

The short answer: the idea is Benjamin De Casseres’s, from 1916 ↗; the sentence people quote is a 20th-century compression of it by nobody in particular; and Lewis Carroll, who died in 1898, is not involved at any point.

Context

How a sentence gets slimmer and more famous

De Casseres wrote for a readership that liked its prose loud. “In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination” is built to be declaimed. What survives a century later is the part that fits on a graphic — and once the ornament is gone, so is the fingerprint that would let you find the author.

That is the mechanism behind most of these: a real sentence by a forgotten writer gets trimmed until it could belong to anybody, and then it gets given to somebody famous. Carroll, who wrote the most quotable nonsense in English, is a natural destination.

Trim a sentence until it could belong to anyone, and someone famous will be handed it.

Read the full story

The chain Quote Investigator lays out runs: 1916, De Casseres in The Poetry Journal; 1926, reprinted in his collection Forty Immortals; January 1935, a Reader’s Digest filler credits Jules de Gaultier; 1945, a speaking handbook reproduces the 1935 wording under the de Gaultier credit; 1966, Levinson’s The Left Handed Dictionary keeps that credit and shortens the words; 1988, a dictionary of quotable definitions prints it as a definition; 2007, a quote-of-the-day account posts “the one weapon”; October 2012, a tweet hands it to Alice in Wonderland.

A detail worth noticing: QI also finds a 1912 poem by Herbert Kaufman containing “He bears but one weapon — imagination”, four years before De Casseres. QI treats it as a thematic match rather than the source, and we follow that rather than promoting it into an earlier origin QI itself does not claim.

Explore

Filed under

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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 Investigator: In the Sublime War of Humanity Against Realityquoteinvestigator.com

The 1916 De Casseres source, and every step of the drift to Carroll.
Wikipedia: Benjamin De Casseresen.wikipedia.org

The American essayist and critic, 1873–1945, who actually wrote it.
Wikiquote: Lewis Carrollen.wikiquote.org

His sourced quotations. This line appears in no section of the page.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (full text)gutenberg.org

The book the line is usually pinned to. Searched; no match.
Through the Looking-Glass (full text)gutenberg.org

Also searched; also no match.

The author

About Benjamin De Casseres

Benjamin De Casseres

1873–1945 · American journalist, critic, essayist & poet

Benjamin De Casseres was a Philadelphia-born journalist and critic who spent most of his working life writing for New York papers — The Sun, the Herald, The New York Times — and corresponded with H. L. Mencken and Eugene O’Neill. He wrote in a deliberately overheated, aphoristic register, which is exactly why a sentence of his survives better once someone else trims it. He was a distant relative of Spinoza.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Benjamin De Casseres, “Shelley,” The Poetry Journal 6, no. 1 (July 1916): 20 — cited as documented in “Quote Origin: In the Sublime War of Humanity Against Reality, Humanity Has But One Weapon, The Imagination,” Quote Investigator, 31 October 2022. The compressed wording quoted on this page is a later, anonymous rewrite of that sentence.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality’?” Last verified 17 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/imagination-is-the-only-weapon-in-the-war-against-reality/

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