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Who really said it

Spare the rod, spoil the child

Not the Bible — actually Samuel Butler Samuel Butler baptized 1613 – 1680 · English poet and satirist
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is a couplet from Butler’s mock-heroic satire Hudibras ↗, Part II, Canto I: “Love is a boy by poets stil’d; / Then spare the rod and spoil the child.” In Butler it is a dirty joke — a widow arguing that the knight deserves a whipping, since the poets call Cupid a boy — and it has nothing to do with raising children. No verse of the King James Bible contains the sentence; the nearest, Proverbs 13:24 ↗, reads “He that spareth his rod hateth his son.”

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Spare the rod, spoil the child” Not the Bible. "Then spare the rod and spoil the child" is Samuel Butler's line from the satirical poem Hudibras, Part II, Canto I (1664) — a joke about whipping Cupid, not a maxim about raising children. The nearest biblical wording, Proverbs 13:24 (KJV), is "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes." — verified at quotle.info · Verbatim: “Love is a boy by poets stil'd; Then spare the rod and spoil the child.”

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Provenance

The primary source

Work
Hudibras, Part II
Author
Samuel Butler (baptized 1613 – 1680)
Location
Part II, Canto I, lines 843–44
First published
Title page dated 1664; copies were on sale in London by December 1663

If matrimony and hanging go
By dest’ny, why not whipping too?
What med’cine else can cure the fits
Of lovers when they lose their wits?
Love is a boy by poets stil’d;
Then spare the rod and spoil the child. Hudibras, Part II, Canto I

Text as transcribed in the Project Gutenberg edition (London, 1805). Spellings vary between printings — other editions give “styl’d” for “stil’d,” and T. R. Nash’s 1835 annotated edition notes at this exact couplet: “Spoil, or spill, as in some copies … frequently used by Chaucer, in the sense of, to ruin, to destroy.”

Scanned edition
Hudibras, with notes by T. R. Nash (1835), page images at the Internet Archive
Read Hudibras in full at Project Gutenberg

How we verified this

Public domain

The couplet is Samuel Butler’s, first printed in Hudibras, Part II with a title page dated 1664; Butler died in 1680, and the poem has been out of copyright for centuries. The edition quoted here was published in London in 1805 and is distributed by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain text. The King James Bible verses shown alongside it were published in 1611 and are 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

Where the credit goes wrong

This is one of the most confidently misquoted sentences in English. It is quoted in sermons, parenting arguments and courtrooms as a Bible verse, and it is not one.

The Bible Not in scripture

No verse of the King James Bible contains it. The verse people mean, Proverbs 13:24 ↗, reads “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” No “spoil,” no if-then. Wiktionary ↗ notes that the “spoil” concept is absent from the Bible, which is precisely why the phrase more likely came from Butler.

The Book of Proverbs Half true

The thought really is biblical — Proverbs 23:13–14 ↗ is blunter still. That overlap is what lets the substitution pass unnoticed: people recognise the sentiment and assume they recognise the sentence.

The Victorians Too late by two centuries

The Phrase Finder observes that the phrase is often assumed to be Victorian ↗ because it sounds like Victorian self-improvement. It was already in print in the Restoration.

Everyone who quotes it about children Wrong subject

In Butler’s poem ↗ the line sits inside a comic argument for flogging a lovesick knight. “Love is a boy by poets stil’d” — so the child to be spanked is Cupid, not anybody’s son.

The words are Samuel Butler’s, from Hudibras ↗, Part II, Canto I, whose title page is dated 1664. The Bible supplied the idea; a Restoration satirist supplied the sentence.

Context

How a joke about whipping Cupid became parenting scripture

The couplet arrives at the least pious moment imaginable. Hudibras, Butler’s ridiculous Puritan knight, has been locked in the stocks and bailed out by a rich widow on one condition: he must flog himself. In Part II she presses the bargain, and runs through a mock-scholastic defence of whipping — whipping as “Virtue’s governess,” whipping as the cure for lovesickness — before landing the punchline. The poets call Love a boy; so spare the rod and spoil the child. The “child” is Cupid.

What travelled was the couplet, stripped of its setting. Butler’s line is short, rhymed and memorable in a way that Proverbs 13:24 is not, and it says roughly what that verse says, so English speakers quietly filed a Restoration satirist’s gag under scripture. The result is a sentence quoted in arguments about discipline for three and a half centuries by people who believe they are quoting the Bible, and who would be startled to learn they are quoting a joke about spanking the god of love.

The “child” in the proverb is Cupid.

What the Bible actually says about the rod

Two passages in Proverbs supply the idea. Proverbs 13:24 (KJV): “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” Proverbs 23:13–14 (KJV): “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”

Neither uses the word “spoil,” and neither has the proverb’s if-then shape. Wiktionary makes the point plainly: the “spoil” concept is not in the Bible, which is why the wording more likely came from Butler.

The proverbial notion is much older than Butler in English. The Phrase Finder cites William Langland’s Piers Plowman, dated there to 1370–90: “Who-so spareth ye sprynge, spilleth his children” — where “spilleth” carries the older sense of ruin or destroy. What Butler contributed was not the thought but the sentence.

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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.

Hudibras — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s transcription of a London 1805 edition; the couplet stands in Part II, Canto I.
Hudibras, with notes by T. R. Nash (1835)archive.org

Scanned annotated edition. Nash prints the couplet and notes “Spoil, or spill, as in some copies.”
spare the rod and spoil the childen.wiktionary.org

Traces the wording to Butler and notes the “spoil” concept is not in the Bible.
Spare the rod and spoil the childphrases.org.uk

Gary Martin credits Butler with the everyday wording and cites Piers Plowman for the older proverb.
Hudibrasen.wikipedia.org

Publication history of the three parts, and the claim that the poem popularised the aphorism.
Bible (King James) — Proverbsen.wikisource.org

The actual scripture, so you can check Proverbs 13:24 and 23:13–14 for yourself.

The real author

Who actually wrote the line

Samuel Butler

baptized 1613 – 1680 · English poet and satirist, author of Hudibras

Samuel Butler (baptized 14 February 1613, died 25 September 1680) was an English poet and satirist, the son of a Worcestershire farmer, and is remembered almost entirely for one book. Hudibras — a mock-heroic poem of more than 11,000 lines about a preposterous Cromwellian knight and his squire, loosely modelled on Don Quixote — delighted Restoration royalists and stayed more or less continuously in print from the 1660s until the First World War. Its jangling octosyllabic couplets were imitated so widely that the verse form is still called Hudibrastic, and the poem seeded English with phrases most speakers now assume came from somewhere older and holier.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II, Canto I, lines 843–44 (title page dated 1664); text quoted from Hudibras, in Three Parts, Written in the Time of the Late Wars (London, 1805), Project Gutenberg ebook no. 4937.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child/

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