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Who really said it

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs

Not Karl Marx — a Tolstoy paraphrase Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910 · Russian novelist & moral philosopher
Disputed Free to reuse

Marx never wrote this. The earliest appearance we could locate is Holbrook Jackson’s Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies (London: Grant Richards, 1911), p. 173, where Jackson quotes it as “Tolstoy’s dictum” — and gives no citation for it. No sentence of this wording has been located in Tolstoy’s own books; it reads as an English compression of the passage in What Then Must We Do? where he describes sitting on a man’s back and wishing to ease his lot by every means — except getting off.

Last verified 9 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs” The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. — Not Karl Marx. Earliest documented appearance: Holbrook Jackson, Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies (London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911), p. 173, where it is quoted as "Tolstoy's dictum" without a citation.

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

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In context

Evoking the world of Leo Tolstoy — Russian novelist & moral philosopher. Theme: "The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs". 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 documented source

Work
Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies
Author
Holbrook Jackson, quoting “Tolstoy’s dictum”
Published
London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911
Location
Essay “Robert Blatchford” (begins p. 168), at p. 173

In his vision of society he sees only the rich and the poor — the rich on the backs of the poor — and he looks upon philanthropy and charitable legislation as so much dross in the way of the realisation of the new Golden Age when there shall be no more poor. He sees in such things but the exemplification of Tolstoy’s dictum that “The rich will do anything for the poor — but get off their backs.” Essay on Robert Blatchford

Jackson prints the line with a dash before “but” — for the poor — but get off their backs — and the “he” of the passage is Robert Blatchford, not Tolstoy. The modern circulating form drops the dash and the surrounding essay, which is part of why the source became untraceable.

Scanned first edition
Read Romance and Reality (1911) at the Internet Archive
Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies (1911), full text

How we verified this

Public domain

The only documented source for this sentence, Holbrook Jackson’s Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies, was first published in London by Grant Richards Ltd. in 1911 — two decades before the 1931 US cutoff — so that text is in the public domain in the United States. Tolstoy’s own What Then Must We Do? (completed 1886) is likewise long out of copyright in its original Russian, though any particular modern English translation of it may not be.

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

Who it gets pinned on

Two attributions circulate, and neither is fully sound. One is simply wrong; the other is plausible but undocumented.

Karl Marx Misattributed

Quotation sites run it under Marx’s name with no work, no year and no page — one typical page ↗ builds a whole interpretation on it without citing a single source or raising a doubt. Wikiquote places the line in the Misattributed section of its Karl Marx page ↗.

Leo Tolstoy, quoted directly Paraphrase

Holbrook Jackson calls it “Tolstoy’s dictum” but names no book, essay or letter. What Tolstoy demonstrably wrote is the longer image in What Then Must We Do? — “I sit on a man’s back … except by getting off his back” ↗. Treat the short form as a paraphrase of Tolstoy, not a quotation from him.

The one thing that is documented: the sentence is printed in Holbrook Jackson’s Romance and Reality (1911) ↗, in an essay about the socialist journalist Robert Blatchford, credited there to Tolstoy and to nobody else.

Context

A socialist journalist, a book of essays, and one borrowed line

The sentence turns up in a place nobody looking for Marx would think to check: an essay on Robert Blatchford, the English socialist journalist who wrote as “Nunquam,” in Holbrook Jackson’s 1911 collection Romance and Reality. Jackson is describing how Blatchford saw society — “only the rich and the poor — the rich on the backs of the poor” — and how he dismissed philanthropy and charitable legislation as beside the point. To make that concrete, Jackson reaches for a line he calls Tolstoy’s dictum, and quotes it.

What he does not do is say where in Tolstoy it comes from. And it is not obviously anywhere: the closest thing in Tolstoy’s own writing is the famous image from What Then Must We Do? — “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me … except by getting off his back.” That is the same argument at four times the length. The fourteen-word version is a compression, and the compression is what travelled.

The rich will do anything for the poor — but get off their backs.

Why the line ended up on Marx

Marx is one of the internet’s most reliable magnets for unsourced political epigrams: anything anti-capitalist, quotable and older than living memory can be pinned to him without anyone reaching for a footnote. This line fits the slot perfectly — it is short, it is about the rich and the poor, and it sounds like something a nineteenth-century radical would say.

The Tolstoy credit and the Marx credit now run in parallel online. Quotation sites present it flatly as Marx, with no work, no year and no page; Wikiquote files it on Marx’s page under Misattributed and points back to Jackson’s book. Neither Marx nor Tolstoy is documented as having written this exact sentence — only Jackson is documented as having printed it.

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Filed under

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Karl Marx — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote files this line under Misattributed on Marx's page, noting it was attributed to Tolstoy in Holbrook Jackson's Romance and Reality (1912).
Romance and Reality (1911), full textarchive.org

Holbrook Jackson's first edition, scanned and searchable. The line appears in the essay on Robert Blatchford.
Romance and Reality, 1912 printingarchive.org

The printing Wikiquote cites; the page number (173) is legible in this scan.
Leo Tolstoy — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the genuine 'I sit on a man's back' passage, the nearest thing in Tolstoy to this epigram.
What Then Must We Do?tolstoyans.wordpress.com

Background on the book, which grew out of Tolstoy's work on the 1882 Moscow census, plus the 'man's back' passage.
Holbrook Jacksonen.wikipedia.org

The British journalist, essayist and bibliophile (1874–1948) in whose 1911 book the line is first documented.

Where the idea actually comes from

About Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Russian novelist & moral philosopher

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, spent the last three decades of his life writing moral and social criticism rather than fiction. What Then Must We Do? grew out of his work on the Moscow census of 1882, when he walked the city’s slums and came away convinced that charity from the wealthy was a way of not changing the arrangement that produced the poverty. That argument — not the neat one-line version — is what he actually put on paper.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Holbrook Jackson, Romance and Reality: Essays and Studies (London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911), 173. Jackson quotes the line as “Tolstoy’s dictum” without giving a source; this is the earliest appearance located, and the one Wikiquote cites (from the 1912 printing).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-rich-will-do-anything-for-the-poor-but-get-off-their/

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