Who really said it

The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum

Q: Is "The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum" really by George Bernard Shaw?

Not confirmed. Widely credited to Shaw, and entirely in character — but the whole case rests on one report. In September 1919 Judge Henry Neil, an American campaigner for pensions for widowed mothers, told newspapers that Shaw had written this to him in private correspondence. No play, preface, published letter or other work of Shaw's has been found containing the sentence. Quote Investigator concludes Shaw probably did use it, while noting the claim depends on Neil's veracity.

Attributed to George Bernard Shaw 1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & polemicist

Attributed Free to reuse

Widely credited to Shaw, and entirely in character — but the whole case rests on one report. In September 1919 Judge Henry Neil, an American campaigner for pensions for widowed mothers, told newspapers that Shaw had written this to him in private correspondence. No play, preface, published letter or other work of Shaw’s has been found containing the sentence. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes Shaw probably did use it, while noting the claim depends on Neil’s veracity.

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

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum” attributed to George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Earliest documented in a letter from Judge Henry Neil printed in September 1919, reporting private correspondence; the line has not been found in any published work by Shaw. Via Quotle.info

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In context

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Provenance

What the record actually contains

Earliest documented: September 1919 — a letter from Judge Henry Neil, printed in the Dublin Weekly Freeman, the London Daily Herald and the New-York Tribune
Reported context: Private correspondence with Neil about state pensions for widowed mothers
Published Shaw work: None located — the sentence appears in no known Shaw play, preface, essay or collected letter
Older ancestor: Memnon ou La Sagesse Humaine

The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum. As reported, September 1919

This is the wording Neil gave the papers, and the one Quote Investigator calls the most common initial phrasing. The London periodical The Nation printed the same remark on 6 September 1919 with one word changed — “this sphere” for “this earth”. No fuller text of the underlying Shaw letter has been produced.

Quote Investigator: the full 1919 chronology

How we verified this

1747–1749 — the conceit is already old. Edward Young calls Earth “the Bedlam of the universe”, and Voltaire’s Memnon fears our globe is the mad-house of a hundred thousand million worlds: QI’s Voltaire article ↗.
September 1919 — Judge Henry Neil’s letter reports the Shaw wording, running in Dublin, London and New York within a fortnight: QI’s Shaw chronology ↗. Notably, the London weekly The Nation had itself printed the same conceit in 1917, before it printed the Shaw version.
1920–1921 — the line detaches from the pensions row and becomes a stock Shaw epigram. Patrick Gallagher’s book cites “what Mr. George Bernard Shaw calls ‘the insane asylum for all other planets’” on page 114 of the 1920 scan ↗.
1929 onward — reassignment. Mark Twain in 1929, Thomas Jefferson in the Commons in 1937, Bertrand Russell via Vonnegut in 2004: QI’s overview ↗.

Public domain

The sentence’s first documented publication is the September 1919 run of Judge Neil’s letter in the Dublin Weekly Freeman, the London Daily Herald and the New-York Tribune; text published that long ago is in the public domain in the United States. That covers only this one reported sentence as printed in 1919 — Shaw’s own later plays, prefaces and correspondence are a separate matter and remain controlled by his estate and publishers.

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.

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Fact-check

The asylum quote has had at least five owners

This is one of the most heavily reassigned lines in circulation. Two problems run in parallel: Shaw did not invent the idea, and other famous names have been handed the sentence outright. Quote Investigator traces the family across more than 250 years ↗.

Edward Young Earlier

The English poet’s The Complaint, Or, Night-thoughts had “Or Earth; the Bedlam of the universe!” in ‘Night Nine’, serialised in The Scots Magazine in 1747 — per QI ↗.

Voltaire Earlier

In Memnon ou La Sagesse Humaine, published by 1749, Memnon fears “that our little terraqueous globe here is the mad-house of those hundred thousand millions of worlds” (1807 English translation) — QI’s Voltaire article ↗. Shaw’s version is a late entry in an old genre, not an invention.

Mark Twain Not substantive

A 1929 St. Louis Post-Dispatch column by Elsie McCormick called it “Mark Twain’s theory” — Twain having died in 1910. QI calls the linkage implausible and not substantive ↗.

Thomas Jefferson Not substantive

In 1937 the MP John Leslie told the House of Commons that Jefferson had observed “this world was the lunatic asylum for other planets”. QI finds no substance in it ↗.

Bertrand Russell Late drift

In a 2004 piece for In These Times, Kurt Vonnegut credited Russell with calling this planet “the lunatic asylum of the Universe” — recorded in QI’s chronology ↗, with no earlier Russell source shown.

The honest summary: the metaphor belongs to Young and Voltaire; the specific sentence belongs to Shaw only on the word of Judge Henry Neil in September 1919, which is why Quote Investigator says he “probably did employ this saying” rather than that he did ↗.

Context

Why a pensions campaigner was quoting Shaw at all

The line did not arrive as an aphorism. It arrived inside an argument about money for widows. Judge Henry Neil was an American promoter of “mothers’ pensions” — cash payments to impoverished widowed mothers — and he had been corresponding with Shaw, who supported them. According to Quote Investigator’s account ↗, what struck Shaw as absurd was the willingness of lawmakers to pension war widows while refusing peace widows. It was that species of illogic, Neil said, that provoked the remark.

Neil then did what campaigners do with a good line from a famous ally: he put it in a letter to the press. In September 1919 versions of that letter ran in the Dublin Weekly Freeman, the London Daily Herald and the New-York Tribune. Within a year the sentence was loose in the wild — a 1920 book on American policy in Asia already cites “what Mr. George Bernard Shaw calls” the insane asylum for all other planets, with no mention of widows, pensions or Judge Neil at all. That is the moment a quote stops being evidence and starts being furniture.

The whole attribution rests on one campaigner’s word about a letter nobody else has produced.

How solid is Judge Neil’s report?

It is second-hand but not anonymous. Neil named Shaw, wrote under his own name, and did so while Shaw was alive, famous and notoriously willing to correct the record in print. No repudiation from Shaw has been located. That is the strongest part of the case.

The weak part: the underlying letter itself has not been produced. Quote Investigator notes that the London periodical The Nation said Neil’s letter had appeared in the Daily News on Monday, 1 September 1919, and states it has not yet accessed that prime citation. The Nation’s own printing also differs by a word: it has “this sphere” where the other papers have “this earth” — see the QI chronology ↗.

Modern quote sites also circulate a smoothed rewrite — ‘the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum’ — which matches none of the 1919 printings. If you are quoting this, quote the 1919 wording and say who reported it.

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Filed under

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

Doubt Humility Wisdom

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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 Origin: This Earth Is Used By Other Planets as a Lunatic Asylumquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Dated chronology from the September 1919 Neil letter onward, plus QI’s verdict that Shaw probably used the line but the claim rests on Neil’s veracity.

Quote Origin: This World Is the Lunatic Asylum of the Universequoteinvestigator.com

QI’s overview of the whole family of sayings — Edward Young 1747, an 1848 Scottish magazine, the 1929 Mark Twain claim, the 1937 Jefferson claim and Vonnegut’s 2004 Bertrand Russell version.

Quote Origin: Our Little Terraqueous Globe Is the Mad-House of the Universequoteinvestigator.com

The Voltaire strand: Memnon ou La Sagesse Humaine (by 1749) in French and in an 1807 English translation, with Fontenelle’s 1686 “Mercury is the Bedlam of the Universe” before it.

America’s Aims and Asia’s Aspirations (1920), full scanarchive.org

Patrick Gallagher’s book, page 114 — a freely readable 1920 printing that already credits Shaw with a variant, “the insane asylum for all other planets.”

George Bernard Shaw — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced Shaw collection. Useful as a negative check: this line does not appear anywhere on the page, in any section.

Shaw, George Bernard — (Attributed)wist.info

WIST Quotations files the line under Attributed, citing Neil’s 6 September 1919 letter to the Dublin Weekly Freeman and the pensions correspondence.

The man it is credited to

George Bernard Shaw

1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & polemicist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1925

Born in Dublin in 1856 and dead in 1950, Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist who took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. He wrote Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and just as prolifically wrote letters, prefaces and press interventions on socialism, vivisection, spelling reform and welfare policy. That combination — enormous fame plus an enormous, scattered, half-unpublished output — is exactly what makes him one of the internet’s favourite hosts for orphan epigrams.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Earliest documented in: Henry Neil, letter, “Shaw’s Reply to Judge Neil,” The Weekly Freeman (Dublin), September 6, 1919, p. 2; also printed as “Pensions for Mothers,” The Daily Herald (London), September 11, 1919, p. 2, and as “This Lunatic World,” New-York Tribune, September 14, 1919, sec. 3, p. 2. Chronology after “Quote Origin: This Earth Is Used By Other Planets as a Lunatic Asylum,” Quote Investigator, July 24, 2018.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-longer-i-live-the-more-i-am-inclined-to-the-belief-that/