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Who really said it

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get

Not Lewis Carroll — an anonymous American joke from the 1940s Unknown Originator unknown · in print since January 1943
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Quote Investigator, which has traced this family of sayings, states there is no substantive evidence Lewis Carroll penned it and that it appears in neither Alice book. The earliest instance it found is a January 1943 item in The Detroit Free Press quoting a truck driver called Bill — “the harder I work the behinder I get” — and the “hurrier” wording turns up in The Indianapolis Star in 1958, collected as a slogan with no creator named. Carroll died in 1898, and was not connected to the joke until 1971.

Last verified 17 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get” Author unknown — not Lewis Carroll. An anonymous American saying, in print since 1943; the "hurrier" wording since 1958. Traced by Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Lewis Carroll. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of work and time. Theme: "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually starts

Claimed source
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
Earliest located instance
“The harder I work the behinder I get” — The Detroit Free Press, 30 January 1943, per Quote Investigator
Earliest “hurrier” instance
The Indianapolis Star, 23 November 1958, per Quote Investigator
Also filed as
An anonymous Pennsylvania Dutch saying (Bennett Cerf, 1965)
Occurrences in Carroll
Zero — “behinder”, “hurrier” and “hurrieder” all absent

“Ya gettin’ caught up with your work, Bill?”
“Naw,” replied Bill, dejectedly, “the harder I work the behinder I get.” The Detroit Free Press, 30 January 1943

Quote Investigator’s transcription of the earliest instance it located — an overheard exchange between two truck drivers, passed on to the paper by a clerical worker at the Michigan Central Terminal. The “hurrier” wording this page is about comes fifteen years later.

Quote Investigator: The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Get

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s article ↗ is the anchor: “There is no substantive evidence that Lewis Carroll penned this saying; it does not appear in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass.” QI dates the family to January 1943 and the “hurrier” form to November 1958, and concludes the originator remains uncertain.
  • We downloaded the Project Gutenberg texts of ten of Carroll’s English books — 2.41 million characters — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ↗ (in two editions), Through the Looking-Glass ↗, The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, Three Sunsets and Other Poems, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, A Tangled Tale, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic — flattened every line break so no phrase could hide across a line ending, and searched the lot. “behinder”, “hurrier” and “hurrieder” occur zero times — and these are invented words, so a near-miss is not possible. If Carroll had coined “behinder”, it would be in the books that made him famous for coining words.
  • A site-wide insource: search of Wikiquote — which reads the raw wikitext of every page — returns zero pages containing “behinder”. It is not on Carroll’s page ↗, not on the Wonderland page ↗, and not filed as a misattribution anywhere on the site. Nobody has debunked it there; nobody has sourced it there either.
  • The reason it feels Carrollian is that he wrote something adjacent, and QI catches the moment of confusion: a 1971 sports column put “The faster I run, the behinder I get” into Alice’s mouth and then answered it with the Red Queen. The real passage, in chapter two of Through the Looking-Glass ↗, runs: “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Same complaint, entirely different words — and Alice never says the joke.

No rights badge. Carroll’s books are long out of copyright but this is not from them; it is an anonymous saying whose earliest traced printing is a 1943 newspaper item quoting an unnamed truck driver, with no identifiable author to hold a right. There is no work here whose status we could honestly report.

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

Often misattributed

Carroll gets the credit, and then three of his characters get the line put in their mouths. None of it holds.

Lewis Carroll Refuted

QI finds no substantive evidence ↗ for it, and “behinder” occurs in none of the ten Carroll books we searched. He died in 1898; the joke first appears in print in 1943.

The White Rabbit Refuted

A 1984 newspaper column attached it to the White Rabbit, and QI reports ↗ that a 2021 Guardian piece found commemorative coins printed with it as his. He says nothing of the kind in either book.

The March Hare Refuted

A 1976 column about school finances “through the looking glass” had the March Hare whisper it, per QI ↗. The March Hare’s actual dialogue is the tea-party scene, and does not include it.

An anonymous Pennsylvania Dutch saying Collector, not author

Bennett Cerf filed it that way in 1965 and a 1975 anthology repeated it, both logged by QI ↗. That is a plausible home for the grammar, and it is honest about there being no author — but it is a folk attribution, not a source.

Plainly: the words are in neither Alice book, the oldest trace is a truck driver quoted in a Detroit paper in 1943 ↗, and what people are half-remembering from Carroll is the Red Queen telling Alice it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.

Context

Why it sounds like him

This is the most understandable of the Carroll fakes, because the joke really is in Carroll — just not the words. The Red Queen’s running lesson in Through the Looking-Glass is the same complaint about effort that outruns progress, and “behinder” is exactly the kind of ungrammatical coinage he liked. Two true things about his writing, combining into one false thing about his writing.

You can watch the join happen. In 1971 a sports columnist wrote a Wonderland pastiche, gave Alice the modern joke, and answered her with the Red Queen’s real argument. Once the two are printed side by side, it takes one careless reprint to lose the seam.

The joke really is in Carroll. The words are from a Detroit loading dock.

Read the full story

Quote Investigator’s chronology: January 1943, two truck drivers overheard in Detroit; December 1943, a Gatlinburg shoemaker; 1958, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get” collected as a slogan in Indianapolis; 1959, a Chattanooga editor insisting he said “hurrieder”; 1965, Bennett Cerf filing it as Pennsylvania Dutch; 1971, Alice; 1976, the March Hare; 1984, the White Rabbit.

The variants are the giveaway. A written line stays fixed; a spoken joke mutates — harder/hurrier/hurrieder/faster, work/go/run — and this one mutates freely for fifteen years before anyone thinks to attach a famous name to it.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Work Time

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Getquoteinvestigator.com

The full trail from 1943 to the modern Carroll credit, with citations for each step.
Through the Looking-Glass (full text)gutenberg.org

Contains the real Red Queen passage this joke gets confused with — and no "behinder".
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (full text)gutenberg.org

The other book it gets credited to. Searched; no match.
Wikiquote: Lewis Carrollen.wikiquote.org

His sourced quotations and misattributed list. The saying is on neither.
Wikipedia: Lewis Carrollen.wikipedia.org

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898 — he died forty-five years before the joke was first printed.

Who it wasn’t

About the name on the mug

Lewis Carroll

1832–1898 · English author, mathematician & logician

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — Lewis Carroll on the title page — taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford for most of his adult life, and wrote the two Alice books and a shelf of logic puzzles alongside it. His real sentences are odd in a particular way: precise, deadpan, and usually about the rules of language rather than about how you feel. That is worth knowing, because the lines invented for him are almost always the opposite — warm, encouraging, and about you.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

No located author. Earliest documented instance of the family: “Behind the Front Page,” The Detroit Free Press, 30 January 1943, 15 — “the harder I work the behinder I get”; earliest “hurrier” instance: The Indianapolis Star, 23 November 1958. Both as documented in “Quote Origin: The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Get,” Quote Investigator, 4 April 2021.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The hurrier I go, the behinder I get’?” Last verified 17 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-hurrier-i-go-the-behinder-i-get/

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