Quote Investigator ↗ found “no substantive support” for the Confucius attribution, and traced the saying instead to an unsigned filler item in the American humor magazine Puck on 24 December 1902: “Things move along so rapidly nowadays that people saying: ‘It can’t be done,’ are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.” The modern wording is a much later reshaping whose author is unknown; the “Confucius say” form is first documented in March 1962, and the George Bernard Shaw credit — first documented in 2004 — is, in QI’s word, spurious.
“People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It” Not Confucius. The earliest known version is an unsigned filler item in Puck magazine, 24 December 1902: "Things move along so rapidly nowadays that people saying: 'It can't be done,' are always being interrupted by somebody doing it." The "Confucius say" form is first documented in March 1962; the George Bernard Shaw credit, first documented in 2004, is spurious. — traced by Quote Investigator
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Confucius. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the themes of doubt, work and success. Theme: "People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It". 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.
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“Confucius say: Man who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt man doing it.” — Adult Leadership, March 1962
First appearance of the modern wording
2004, credited to George Bernard Shaw in a book about the Smithsonian
Things move along so rapidly nowadays that people saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.
Unsigned filler
This is the whole item — a single sentence, no byline, no context, printed to fill space. It is the earliest version Quote Investigator ↗ has located. Note what it is not: it is an observation about how fast the world is changing, not an instruction to obstructionists. The imperative form — “should not interrupt” — is not documented until 1962.
24 December 1902 — Puck, New York. The earliest known version appears as an unsigned filler item on page 2. It is reprinted on 7 March 1903 by The Public of Chicago with an acknowledgement to Puck, and again in Kindergarten Magazine in April 1903. Quote Investigator ↗
May 1914 — The Philistine. Elbert Hubbard prints a variant but writes “Some one has said,” disclaiming authorship. He is credited with it anyway from 1915 onward, and still in reference works decades later ↗ — a 3 April 1915 Democrat-Forum advertisement, and Evan Esar’s Dictionary of Humorous Quotations in 1949.
March 1962 — Adult Leadership. The first documented Confucian version, in the “Confucius say: Man who…” joke format. A 1974 U.S. Senate hearing record repeats it as Confucius; a 1977 Georgia newspaper upgrades it to an “old Chinese proverb.” Chronology ↗
2004, then June 2018. The modern wording surfaces credited to George Bernard Shaw in a book about the Smithsonian. Fourteen years on it is tweeted as a “Chinese Proverb” and rated False by PolitiFact ↗.
No rights status can honestly be asserted for the wording on this page. The 1902 Puck filler and its 1903 reprints are long in the public domain in the United States, but that is a different sentence. The familiar modern wording is an anonymous reshaping whose author, date and place of first composition are all unidentified — the earliest instance Quote Investigator ↗ documents is from 2004, well inside the copyright term, and even that one is a re-quotation rather than an origin. Treat it as unsourced and unclearable.
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 wrong credits, in the order they appeared
This saying has been pinned on more famous men than almost any other one-liner of its size. Quote Investigator ↗ dates each credit, and none of them reaches the 1902 original.
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The 1914–1949 attributionsElbert Hubbard Disclaimed by the man himself
Hubbard printed a variant in The Philistine in May 1914 but prefaced it “Some one has said,” declining credit. A 1915 Missouri newspaper advertisement and Evan Esar’s 1949 Dictionary of Humorous Quotations credited him anyway. See the chronology ↗.
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The “Confucius say” version, from March 1962Confucius Fabricated — a joke template
The earliest documented Confucian version appeared in the periodical Adult Leadership in March 1962, cast in the “Confucius say: Man who…” pidgin format that QI notes was long used for gags unconnected to genuine Confucian sayings. It surfaced in a 1974 U.S. Senate hearing record and has never been traced any earlier. Quote Investigator ↗.
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The “old Chinese proverb” framing, from 1977Chinese proverbial tradition No source in Chinese
A Marietta, Georgia newspaper called it an old Chinese proverb in October 1977; the framing spread from there. When it was tweeted as a Chinese Proverb on 11 June 2018, PolitiFact rated the claim False ↗: the Asia Society’s Isaac Stone Fish said the line cannot be reasonably attributed to anyone in the Chinese intellectual tradition, and East Asian studies professors at Princeton and Penn agreed it is not Chinese.
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The exact modern wording, from 2004George Bernard Shaw Spurious
The familiar modern sentence first appears credited to Shaw in a 2004 book about the Smithsonian, alongside other Shaw one-liners. QI’s verdict on that link is one word: spurious. Read the entry ↗.
✓The saying is American, not Chinese; it is anonymous, not Confucian; and the earliest version anyone has found is a joke about the speed of invention, printed to fill a column inch in Puck on 24 December 1902 — per Quote Investigator ↗.
Context
How a filler item became a fortune cookie
The sentence people share today is not a translation of anything. It is the end point of a hundred-year game of telephone that began as throwaway column filler about the pace of invention — a joke about a world moving so fast that pessimists kept getting cut off mid-sentence. Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ shows the line shedding its 1902 framing decade by decade, getting shorter and more epigrammatic, and picking up a famous name only once it was short enough to fit on a poster.
The turn that mattered came in March 1962, when a periodical called Adult Leadership printed it in the “Confucius say” pidgin-joke template — a format, QI notes, long used for gags with no connection to the genuine sayings of Confucius. The joke frame fell away and the attribution stayed. By 1977 a Georgia newspaper was calling it an old Chinese proverb, and in June 2018 it was tweeted to millions as one, prompting a PolitiFact fact-check ↗ in which a Princeton sinologist compared the habit to the old fashion of putting “Confucius said” in front of a weak joke.
It was never wisdom from the East. It was a gag about the Wright brothers’ century, printed to fill a column inch.
The Elbert Hubbard branch — a credit he never claimed
In May 1914 the aphorist Elbert Hubbard printed a variant in The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, the magazine he edited — but he opened it with “Some one has said,” explicitly declining authorship. It did not help. A 1915 newspaper advertisement in Missouri printed a version over his name, and Evan Esar’s Dictionary of Humorous Quotations was still crediting Hubbard in 1949.
Hubbard, who founded the Roycrofters ↗ and edited The Philistine, died aboard the Lusitania in 1915 — so nearly every attribution to him was made after he could contest it. His is the one wrong credit in this story where the man himself is on record saying the line was not his.
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The earliest known appearance
Where the trail starts
PK
Anonymous (Puck magazine)
Puck · American humor weekly, 1876–1918 · unsigned filler item, 24 December 1902
The line has no known author. Its earliest documented ancestor is an unsigned one-sentence filler in Puck, which Wikipedia describes ↗ as the first successful humor magazine in the United States, published from 1876 to 1918 and produced from the Puck Building in New York. Filler items of this kind were printed to fill column space, usually without a byline, and were freely reprinted by other papers — which is exactly what happened here, with The Public of Chicago picking it up on 7 March 1903 and Kindergarten Magazine in April 1903. Over the following decades the sentence was compressed, re-pointed and repeatedly re-credited, until the compact modern form arrived attached to names that never said it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source & research trail
Earliest documented in: filler item, Puck, vol. 52 (24 December 1902), quote page 2. Traced in “Quote Origin: People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It,” Quote Investigator, 26 January 2015 (updated 5 January 2025).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/people-who-say-it-cannot-be-done-should-not-interrupt-those/