The line is in none of Bierce’s books. The earliest instance anyone has documented is a 1954 newspaper column reporting a quip Groucho Marx aimed at his quiz-show contestants: “If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” Quote Investigator credits Groucho on that evidence, while noting he was quoted secondhand — the polished wording that circulates today first appears in The Reader’s Digest in September 1956, credited to “Anonymous.”
“Speak When You're Angry and You'll Make the Best Speech You'll Ever Regret” Widely credited to Ambrose Bierce, but the line appears in none of his works. The earliest documented instance is Groucho Marx, quoted in Eve Starr's "Inside TV" column, Greensboro Record, 3 November 1954. Research: Quote Investigator. · Verbatim: “If you speak when angry, you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Ambrose Bierce. 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 Groucho Marx — American comedian, actor & host of You Bet Your Life. Theme: "Speak When You're Angry and You'll Make the Best Speech You'll Ever Regret". 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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Provenance
Where the line actually first appears
Earliest documented instance
Greensboro Record, “Inside TV” by Eve Starr
Date
3 November 1954, p. B3, col. 4
Spoken by
Groucho Marx, as advice to his quiz-show contestants
In Bierce’s works
Absent — not in Fantastic Fables (1899) or The Devil’s Dictionary (1911; issued in part as The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906)
Groucho quips: “It takes a heap of spending to make a house a home.” His best advice to contestants is: “If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.”
Greensboro Record, 1954
Garson O’Toole — the pen name under which Quote Investigator is written — dates the column 3 November 1954 in both his January 2014 post to the American Dialect Society list and the article’s own bibliographic note, which reproduces the same GenealogyBank citation. That is one researcher, not two, so treat it as a single sourcing. (The running text of the Quote Investigator article says “June 1954,” which its own citation does not support.) Note also that Groucho’s wording is not quite the wording that circulates today; the familiar form first appears in The Reader’s Digest in September 1956, credited to “Anonymous.”
Bierce’s Fantastic Fables (1899) does contain a fable on this theme — “Father and Son” ↗, in which an aged father makes his “fiery and disobedient Son” promise to count to one hundred before he moves or speaks in anger, then strikes him with a walking stick and escapes by cab while the boy is still counting. The adage itself is nowhere in the book.
The earliest instance anyone has produced is a 1954 newspaper column: Quote Investigator ↗ cites Eve Starr’s “Inside TV” in the Greensboro Record, reporting Groucho Marx’s advice to contestants. QI hypothesises the show was You Bet Your Life, which Marx hosted, but the column does not name it.
The wording that circulates today arrives unowned. The Reader’s Digest printed it in September 1956 credited to “Anonymous”; a Geneva, New York paper gave it to one “Harry H. Jones” in July 1957; Earl Wilson printed a variant with no source in 1958 — all documented in Quote Investigator’s citation trail ↗.
A major reference work repeated the Bierce credit and named a source that does not contain the line: Garson O’Toole told the American Dialect Society list ↗ that the Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations (second edition, 2006) credited the line to Bierce and sourced it to “The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906” — a book in which he had been unable to find it, and he asked the list for any pre-1954 instance or any earlier Bierce attribution. That entry cannot be where the credit began: the earliest Bierce credit Quote Investigator has located is a 1986 church advertisement in the Altoona Mirror, twenty years before it. Neither O’Toole nor QI identifies an origin for the Bierce credit.
No first publication can be identified for this saying, so no rights status can honestly be asserted — but it is certainly not public domain by age. Every documented instance is mid-twentieth-century American: a 1954 newspaper column quoting a spoken remark, then a 1956 Reader’s Digest filler credited to “Anonymous.” Bierce’s Fantastic Fables (1899) and The Devil’s Dictionary (1911; issued in part as The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906) are both public domain in the United States, but neither contains this line, so their status does not transfer to 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
Three famous names, none of them right
This adage has been hung on a preacher, a satirist and a management theorist, in that order. Quote Investigator rejects all three, and the reasons are different in each case.
✕
The satiristAmbrose Bierce Not in his books
Nobody has produced a source for it. Quote researcher Garson O’Toole — who writes Quote Investigator — reported to the American Dialect Society ↗ that the Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations (second edition, 2006) gave the line to Bierce and sourced it to “The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906,” but that he could not find it in any edition he examined. It is likewise absent from the full text of The Devil’s Dictionary ↗ and from Fantastic Fables ↗. The earliest instance crediting Bierce that QI has located is a 1986 church advertisement in the Altoona Mirror in Pennsylvania — two decades before that reference-book entry, so the book repeated the credit rather than starting it, and QI names no origin for it.
✕
The preacherHenry Ward Beecher A misread parenthesis
In Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977, p. 51), Laurence J. Peter printed a real Beecher line — “Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry” — and appended his own parenthetical comment containing this adage. Quote Investigator shows the entry ↗ and notes the parenthesis was Peter’s, not Beecher’s. Ann Landers repeated the Beecher credit in a 1978 column, rendering the name as “Harriet Ward Beecher.”
✕
The compilerLaurence J. Peter Credited for quoting
Having written the parenthesis in 1977, Peter was himself named as the author a decade later: a “Thought for Today” item in a Medina, New York newspaper in 1987 ascribed the saying to “Dr. Laurence J. Peter, Canadian born educator and author,” as catalogued by Quote Investigator ↗. He was passing on a line already in circulation for over twenty years.
✓On the evidence assembled by Quote Investigator ↗, the first person on record saying anything like this is Groucho Marx in 1954 — and even he was reported secondhand by a television columnist, with the familiar wording only settling into place in The Reader’s Digest in 1956, over the byline “Anonymous.”
Context
Why this one sticks to Bierce
Ambrose Bierce is the perfect landing pad for a sour epigram. He built his reputation on The Devil’s Dictionary, a book of definitions engineered to be quotable and unkind, so almost any bitter one-liner sounds like something he might have filed under “A.” Better still, he really did write about anger and the counting trick: in Fantastic Fables (1899) a father makes his hot-tempered son promise to count to a hundred before he moves or speaks, then hits him with a walking stick and escapes by cab while the boy is still counting. The theme matches. The sentence does not appear.
Where the credit started, nobody knows. Garson O’Toole, the quote researcher who writes Quote Investigator, went through multiple editions of Bierce without finding the line — and reported that the Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations (second edition, 2006) had nonetheless given it to him and sourced it to “The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906.” That entry arrived twenty years after the earliest Bierce credit on record, a 1986 church advertisement, so a reference book cannot be the origin, and no origin has been found. Bierce vanished in Mexico at the end of 1913; the first trace of this saying anywhere is 1954, on American television.
Bierce wrote a fable about counting to a hundred before you speak in anger. He did not write this.
The Beecher tangle, and how Ann Landers made it worse
The rival credit — the preacher Henry Ward Beecher — comes from a typographical misreading. In Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), Laurence J. Peter printed a genuine Beecher line, “Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry,” and then added his own parenthetical gloss: “(Speak when you’re angry—and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.)” Readers took the parenthesis as part of the quotation.
In 1978 the advice columnist Ann Landers passed the Beecher version on to a national readership — and got the first name wrong as well, printing it as “Harriet Ward Beecher.” A decade after that, a New York newspaper solved the confusion by crediting the line to Laurence J. Peter instead, which at least had the merit of naming someone who had actually written it down.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1890–1977 · American comedian, actor & host of You Bet Your Life
Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx was an American comedian, actor and game-show host who worked in vaudeville, on Broadway, in films, on radio and on television. From 1947 he fronted the quiz show You Bet Your Life, first on radio and then on television from 1950 until its cancellation in 1961; the format existed mainly so that he could ad-lib at contestants before getting around to the questions. That is exactly the setting in which this line surfaces — as advice to contestants, reported by a television columnist in 1954.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented instance
Eve Starr, “Inside TV,” Greensboro Record (Greensboro, NC), November 3, 1954, p. B3, quoting Groucho Marx; catalogued in Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: Speak When You’re Angry and You’ll Make the Best Speech You’ll Ever Regret,” Quote Investigator, May 17, 2014. The saying appears in no known work by Ambrose Bierce.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Speak When You're Angry and You'll Make the Best Speech You'll Ever Regret’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/speak-when-youre-angry-and-youll-make-the-best-speech-youll/