The line is Josh Billings’s, and it survives in his own trademark misspelling, as the 1874 book prints it: “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so.” A slightly different dialect wording ran in newspapers under his byline from May 1869, before the sentence was collected in Everybody’s Friend (1874), in a section of aphorisms headed “Sollum Thoughts.” Artemus Ward died in 1867, two years before the earliest printing anyone has documented; his name was attached to the saying not until 1897, on the record Quote Investigator assembled.
“It Is Better to Know Nothing than to Know What Ain't So” Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), Everybody's Friend, or Josh Billing's Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1874), "Affurisms: Sollum Thoughts," p. 286; earliest documented printing, Harrisburg Telegraph, 7 May 1869. Not Artemus Ward, who died in 1867 — his name was attached to the saying not until 1897, on the record Quote Investigator assembled. Source: Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain't so.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Artemus Ward. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The 1874 book — and the newspaper columns five years before it
Work
Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor
Section
“Affurisms: Sollum Thoughts,” quote page 286
Published
1874 · American Publishing Company, Hartford, Connecticut · illustrated by Thomas Nast and others
Earliest printing
“Sollum Thoughts” by Josh Billings, Harrisburg Telegraph, 7 May 1869 — the earliest instance Quote Investigator documents
Hope iz a hen that lays more eggs than she kan hatch out. Better leave yure child virtew than money; but this iz a sekret known only tew a few. I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so. About the hardest work a phellow kan do iz tew spark two galls at once, and preserve a good average.
Affurisms: Sollum Thoughts
The spelling is Billings’s own, not a transcription error — the whole book is written that way, and “two” here is his rendering of “tew.” The smooth modern form everyone quotes (“It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so”) is a standard-spelling modernisation of this sentence, not a separate line by a separate author.
1897 — Thirty years after Artemus Ward’s death, a rephrased version is credited to him in The North-Western Journal of Education — with his name misspelled “Artemas.” Quote Investigator records the citation ↗.
The irony — a rephrased form of the aphorism does appear in The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, exactly once: “You’d better not know so much, than know so many things that ain’t so,” in Melville D. Landon’s biographical sketch, where it is credited to Josh Billings. Search the Project Gutenberg text for that wording ↗ — Ward never wrote it.
✓Public domain
Everybody’s Friend was published in Hartford by the American Publishing Company in 1874, and the sentence was already in American newspapers in 1869 — far earlier than the 1931 US copyright threshold — so the text is in the public domain in the United States. Josh Billings died in 1885. The full 1874 volume is freely readable at the Internet Archive, and The Complete Works of Artemus Ward is free at Project Gutenberg.
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 famous names, one actual author
This sentence belongs to a whole family of American wisecracks about confident ignorance, and the family has been passed round the great humorists like a hat. Quote Investigator traces the specific wording here to Josh Billings and then watches the credit migrate, decade by decade, to bigger names.
Bad spelling is a terrible way to protect your copyright. Billings built a career on writing “iz” and “tew” and “beleave” — it was the joke, the brand, the reason people bought the book. But it means that for a century and a half, every reader who wanted to quote him has had to smooth him out first, and a smoothed-out sentence carries no fingerprints. For most of that stretch, a search for “it is better to know nothing” led nowhere near Billings; only recently have citation-first databases such as WIST and Wikiquote begun printing the dialect original and the standard-spelling rendering side by side.
So the line went looking for a father, and nineteenth-century America had a surplus of candidates. Artemus Ward got it in 1897, Mark Twain in 1899, Abraham Lincoln in 1900, Will Rogers much later. Quote Investigator describes the mechanism plainly: sayings in this family get rephrased, hybridised with each other, and re-ascribed from one prominent humorist to the next — which is how a line first printed in a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1869 ends up on a poster with somebody else’s face on it.
A joke about confident wrong knowledge became a case study in confident wrong knowledge.
An older cousin, and a foreign one. Quote Investigator notes a thematic precursor in a 1747 history of Persia — “it is better to know nothing, than to apprehend we know what we know not” — and a separate branch in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, rendered in Thomas Common’s 1911 English as “Better know nothing than half-know many things!” ↗. Neither is the sentence on this page.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1818–1885 · American humorist, lecturer and aphorist
Josh Billings was the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw (born 21 April 1818, Lanesborough, Massachusetts; died 14 October 1885, Monterey, California), one of the most widely read American humorists of the post–Civil War decades. His signature device was eccentric phonetic spelling — “iz” for is, “tew” for to, “beleave” for believe — wrapped around aphorisms sharp enough to survive the joke. That spelling is exactly why his best lines kept getting handed to other people: for most of the last century and a half, a reader searching for “it is better to know nothing” had no way to reach “it iz better tew know nothing,” so the sentence circulated unmoored from its author — long enough for four other humorists to be given the credit before quotation databases started indexing both spellings.
For writers & researchers
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Cite this source
Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw]. “Affurisms: Sollum Thoughts.” In Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor, 286. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1874. Earliest printing documented by Quote Investigator: “Sollum Thoughts” by Josh Billings, Harrisburg Telegraph (Harrisburg, PA), May 7, 1869, 1.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It Is Better to Know Nothing than to Know What Ain't So’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-better-to-know-nothing-than-to-know-what-aint-so/