The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization
Not Sigmund Freud’s line — he was quoting someone elseSigmund Freud, crediting an unnamed English writer1856–1939 · Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis
?Attribution status: Disputed — the thought reached print through Freud, but he disclaimed it, and these particular words are not his.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
Freud did put this thought in print — in an 1893 Wiener Medizinische Presse article written with Josef Breuer — but he introduced it as a witticism by “an English writer” whom he never named. The wording that circulates today, with an insult and a stone, is a later English rewrite that Quote Investigator ↗ documents in Robert Byrne’s 1988 quotation collection, not in anything Freud wrote.
“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization” Not Freud's own line. In 1893, in a Wiener Medizinische Presse article written with Josef Breuer, Freud used the remark — in James Strachey's translation, "the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization" — but introduced it as the wit of an unnamed English writer. The "insult instead of a stone" wording is a later rewrite, documented in Robert Byrne's 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988). Source: Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/05/spear/ Verbatim: “As an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization.”
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? 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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Evoking the world of Sigmund Freud — Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis. Theme: "The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization". 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
The nearest thing to a source
Where the thought appears
Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene
Published
Wiener Medizinische Presse, 1893, by Dr. Josef Breuer and Dr. Sigmund Freud
Translation
James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (1962)
Modern wording documented in
Robert Byrne, 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988)
… as an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization.
1893 · Wiener Medizinische Presse
James Strachey’s English rendering of the 1893 article, as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗. Note the opening clause: the credit to an unnamed English writer is Freud’s own, and it is the part that later retellings dropped.
Search Quote Investigator for the saying and you land on its 2015 investigation ↗. QI’s own heading lines up the candidates — Freud, an English writer, Walt Menninger, Joyce Brothers, Robert Byrne — and closes with the word “Apocryphal?” That heading is QI’s editorial summary, not a period quotation.
QI’s conclusion is that Freud helped popularize the expression by employing it in a German medical-journal article in 1893, while crediting an unnamed English writer. The article is Breuer and Freud’s “Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene” in the Wiener Medizinische Presse; QI cites James Strachey’s English translation ↗ in volume 3 of the Standard Edition (1962).
The Freud-as-author claim enters the record much later. QI documents Dr. Walt Menninger in 1976 and Dr. Joyce Brothers in 1978 attributing it to Freud outright, then variant forms in 1979 and 1980, then the insult-and-stone wording in Robert Byrne’s 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988) ↗ — Fawcett Columbine, New York.
As a cross-check, Wikiquote’s Sigmund Freud page ↗ carries no entry for this saying in any section, sourced or otherwise. For a line this widely shared, that absence is itself evidence.
No rights status is asserted for the popular wording, because nobody can say who wrote it. The sentence Freud actually printed dates from 1893 and would long since be out of copyright in its German original, but the English words quoted above come from James Strachey’s 1962 translation, and the “insult instead of a stone” rewrite is documented only from 1988 — both modern, and neither of them Freud’s own composition. Treat this line as an unattributed modern paraphrase rather than a public-domain quotation.
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
How a borrowed witticism became a Freud quote
This is not a fabrication — the thought really does appear in Freud’s published work. The error is subtler and, in a way, more instructive: Freud printed the remark as someone else’s, and the credit was quietly deleted somewhere between 1893 and the modern quotation books.
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The authorshipSigmund Freud Popularizer, not author
In the 1893 Wiener Medizinische Presse article written with Josef Breuer, the remark is introduced as the wit of “an English writer” — a writer Freud does not name and whom Quote Investigator ↗ was unable to identify.
✕
How it got pinned on FreudWalt Menninger (1976) and Joyce Brothers (1978) Newspaper columns
Quote Investigator records Dr. Walt Menninger ascribing the saying to Freud in a 1976 Cleveland Plain Dealer column, and Dr. Joyce Brothers repeating Menninger’s Freud attribution in 1978 — the point at which the English writer disappears from the story. See the QI chronology ↗.
✕
The exact modern wordingRobert Byrne’s 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1988) Quotation book
The insult-and-stone form that circulates today is documented in Byrne’s 1988 compendium ↗, listed under Freud. Byrne’s entry reads “The first human being who…”; the version shared now has even dropped that word.
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The weaponSpear, then weapon, then rock, then stone Drift
Freud’s printed version has a spear and a “word of abuse”. The QI chronology ↗ then shows a curse and a weapon in 1979, a curse and a rock in 1980, and finally an insult and a stone in 1988 — each retelling a little smoother and a little further from the source.
✓The honest answer: Freud published the idea in 1893 and openly credited an English writer he did not name; the sentence people quote today was assembled by others decades later, and is documented in that exact form only from 1988 ↗.
Context
Why the idea stuck anyway
The sentence is a compact theory of civilisation: culture begins the moment a person substitutes a word for a weapon. It is genuinely useful, which is part of why it survived — and part of why nobody stopped to check it. Freud thought it good enough to quote in a medical paper, and the quotation books thought his name good enough to keep.
What got lost in transmission is the honest bit. Freud passed the line along as borrowed wit; the attribution chain then stripped out the borrowing and left only the borrower. It is a small, very ordinary way that quotations go wrong: the most famous person in the sentence becomes its author.
Freud handed the line on with a note of credit. The internet kept the line and dropped the credit.
How the wording drifted
Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the weapon changing with each retelling. The 1893 translation has a spear and a “word of abuse”. Walt Menninger’s 1976 newspaper column and Joyce Brothers’ 1978 column keep the spear but swap in “insult”. A 1979 profile of Reinhold Aman has a curse and a weapon; a 1980 Times-Picayune item has a curse and a rock. Only with Robert Byrne’s 1988 collection does the now-familiar insult-and-stone pairing appear.
Even the form circulating today is a hair off Byrne’s. His entry reads “The first human being who…”; the popular version drops “being”. That is one more edit away from anything Freud set in type.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1939 · Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, and whose Studies on Hysteria (1895), written with Josef Breuer, grew out of the same early-1890s work in which this remark appears. He is one of the most quotable figures of the twentieth century, which is precisely why so many aphorisms drift onto his name. In this case the drift is documented: Freud printed the saying but expressly credited it to someone else, and the version people share now is not the sentence he printed.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Nearest documented source
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene,” Wiener Medizinische Presse (1893); English translation by James Strachey in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (1962) — where the remark is introduced as the witticism of an unnamed English writer. The modern “insult instead of a stone” wording is documented by Quote Investigator in Robert Byrne, 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988). Attribution to Freud as author: unsupported.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-first-human-who-hurled-an-insult-instead-of-a-stone-was/