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Who really said it

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit

Not Harry S. Truman — a reworking of an 1863 remark Father Strickland fl. 1863 · English Jesuit priest, quoted in Grant Duff’s diary
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No record from Truman’s lifetime has him saying this. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the thought to an English Jesuit named Father Strickland, whose remark Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff wrote into his diary on 21 September 1863; the earliest credit to Truman it has found is a Time column of 7 November 1988. The familiar “it is amazing what you can accomplish” phrasing is a twentieth-century reshaping, not Strickland’s words and not Truman’s.

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

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit” not Harry S. Truman. The earliest documented form is Father Strickland's remark to Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff on 21 September 1863: "a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it" (Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, vol. 1, London: John Murray, 1897, p. 237). The earliest known credit to Truman is Hugh Sidey in Time, 7 November 1988, per Quote Investigator. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “I have observed, throughout life, that a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Harry S. Truman. 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 Father Strickland — English Jesuit priest · recorded by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff. Theme: "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit". 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 "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit". 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 1863 diary entry

Earliest record
Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, vol. 1, p. 237
Diarist
Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff; entry dated 21 September 1863, published London: John Murray, 1897
Speaker
Father Strickland, described only as “an English Jesuit”
Truman link
None contemporary. Earliest known credit to Truman: Time, 7 November 1988

September · 21. Met at the house of the Rev. C. K. Paul, at Stourminster Marshall, Father Strickland, an English Jesuit, who said to me—“I have observed, throughout life, that a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.” Earliest documented form, 1863

Transcribed from the scanned first edition, where the day number sits under a “September” month heading. The place name is printed as “Stourminster Marshall.” Note the wording: this is not the popular sentence, which reshapes the thought roughly a century later.

Scanned first edition
Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, vol. 1 (John Murray, 1897), p. 237
Quote Investigator: A Man May Do an Immense Deal of Good, If He Does Not Care Who Gets the Credit

How the line travelled

  • 1863, spoken. Father Strickland’s remark, written into Grant Duff’s diary and printed in 1897 at p. 237 ↗.
  • 1905–1922, drifting. Versions credited in turn to Benjamin Jowett, Edward Everett Hale and C. E. Montague, with Quote Investigator ↗ tracking each reassignment.
  • 1982, on a desk. The variant on Reagan’s Oval Office sign, filmed by White House Television on 25 September 1982 ↗.
  • 1988, pinned to Truman. Time’s Hugh Sidey gives the modern wording to Harry S. Truman on 7 November 1988 — the earliest such credit Quote Investigator ↗ has located, and the point from which the quote databases copy.

The popular wording cannot be tied to any identified author or work, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The 1863 sentence shown above is a different matter: it appears in Grant Duff’s Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, published by John Murray in 1897, which is long in the public domain in the United States.

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

Who has been given the credit for “who gets the credit”

For a sentence about not needing credit, this one has been handed around a great deal. Here is who has held it, and on what evidence.

Harry S. Truman Misattributed

Nothing from Truman’s lifetime carries it. Quote Investigator ↗ reports it has “not found any substantial support” for the attribution, and dates the earliest Truman credit to Hugh Sidey’s column in Time, 7 November 1988. Wikiquote ↗ lists it under “Misattributed.”

Ronald Reagan Displayed, not written

Reagan kept a sign on the Oval Office desk reading “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit” — filmed by White House Television on 25 September 1982 ↗. He popularised the wording; the sentiment was already more than a century old.

Benjamin Jowett Credited, then withdrawn

Edward T. Cook credited Jowett in 1905 with “the way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them,” then reassigned it in 1909 to “a wise man” and in 1911 to a “Jesuit Father” — per Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗.

Edward Everett Hale and C. E. Montague Downstream

Both used versions in the decades after 1893, and Montague explicitly credited his to someone else rather than claiming it, according to Quote Investigator ↗.

The Truman Library Institute Unsourced

Its public Truman Quotes page ↗ presents the line as Truman’s with no source attached — one reason the attribution keeps regenerating.

The earliest documented form belongs to Father Strickland, an English Jesuit, speaking on 21 September 1863 and printed in Grant Duff’s Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, vol. 1, p. 237 ↗: “a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.”

Context

Why this one stuck to Truman

The saying travelled for a century and a quarter before it landed on a president. Grant Duff heard it from a Jesuit in 1863 and printed it in 1897; Edward Everett Hale, Benjamin Jowett and C. E. Montague were each credited with versions of it over the following decades; a coaching magazine and a Kansas state legislator were using the modern “it’s amazing what you can accomplish” shape in the 1970s and early 1980s. Nobody needed Truman for any of that.

What Truman supplied was plausibility. A plain-spoken president who kept THE BUCK STOPS HERE on his desk is exactly the sort of person the line sounds like — and once Time attached his name to it in 1988, quotation databases copied it forward without ever asking what he had supposedly been saying, or to whom, or when. The Truman Library Institute’s own quotations page runs it today with no source attached.

The sentence is real, old, and worth keeping. The name on it is the only fabricated part.

The chain of credit, 1863–1988

1863 — Father Strickland to Grant Duff: “a man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.” Published 1897.

1905–1911 — Edward T. Cook credits a version to Benjamin Jowett, then reassigns it to “a wise man,” then to a “Jesuit Father,” per Quote Investigator’s chronology.

1982 — White House Television films the sign on Ronald Reagan’s Oval Office desk: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

1988 — Hugh Sidey’s Time column gives the modern wording to Harry S. Truman — the earliest such credit Quote Investigator has located.

Explore

Filed under

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

Leadership Humility Work

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: “A Man May Do an Immense Deal of Good…”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the full 1863–1988 chronology, and the finding that no substantial support exists for the Truman attribution.
Wikiquote: Harry S. Trumanen.wikiquote.org

Files this line under “Misattributed,” noting a similar saying recorded as early as 1863.
Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872, vol. 1 (1897)archive.org

Scanned first edition; the Strickland entry is on page 237, under September 1863.
WHTV footage of the Oval Office desk sign, 25 September 1982reaganlibrary.gov

National Archives record of Reagan’s desk plaque bearing the “no limit to what a man can do” variant.
WIST Quotations: Harry S. Trumanwist.info

Classes the Truman attribution as spurious and names Hugh Sidey’s 1988 Time piece as the earliest.
Truman Library Institute — Truman Quoteswww.trumanlibraryinstitute.org

The institute’s own quotations page still presents the line as Truman’s, with no source given.

The man the line actually belongs to

About Father Strickland

Father Strickland

fl. 1863 · English Jesuit priest · recorded by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff

Almost nothing is documented about him beyond a single evening. On 21 September 1863, at the house of the Rev. C. K. Paul in Dorset, an English Jesuit whom the diarist names only as Father Strickland told Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff that a man may do an immense deal of good if he does not care who gets the credit for it. Grant Duff — a Liberal MP, later Governor of Madras, and a compulsive recorder of other people’s good lines — kept the sentence in his notebook for thirty-four years before publishing it, which is the only reason we have it at all. Quote Investigator identifies him as the key progenitor of the whole family of sayings that eventually reached Truman’s name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — the 1863 diary entry

Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, “Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872,” vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1897), 237 (entry for 21 September 1863). Earliest documented credit to Harry S. Truman: Hugh Sidey, “Time,” 7 November 1988, per Quote Investigator.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-amazing-what-you-can-accomplish-if-you-do-not-care/

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