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Who really said it

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short

Attributed to Abraham Maslow 1908–1970 · American psychologist, founder of humanistic psychology
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Widely credited to Maslow and squarely in line with his life’s argument — but no book, lecture transcript or letter containing this wording has been produced. The earliest citation on record is a 1993 motivational paperback, published after his death; what Maslow demonstrably wrote is a differently worded sentence in Toward a Psychology of Being.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short” Attributed to Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). No primary source located; the earliest citation found is Jim Whitt, "Road Signs for Success" (1993), p. 61. Maslow's documented version, in "Toward a Psychology of Being," reads: "the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short." Via Quotle.info

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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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In context

Evoking the world of Abraham Maslow — American psychologist · Brandeis University. Theme: "The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short". 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

What can actually be cited

Popular wording
No primary source located
Earliest citation on record
Jim Whitt, Road Signs for Success (1993), p. 61 — per Wikiquote
Documented cousin
Toward a Psychology of Being
That book
Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1962; 2nd ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968 — sentence in the Introduction, p. 4

This inner nature, as much as we know of it so far, seems not to be intrinsically or primarily or necessarily evil… Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short. the sourced version

This is the sentence Maslow demonstrably wrote — from the Introduction, ‘Toward a Psychology of Health,’ p. 4 of the second edition. The popular one-liner is not this sentence and has no located source of its own.

Wikiquote: Abraham Maslow, Attributed section

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote ↗ places the line in its “Attributed” section, citing only Jim Whitt’s Road Signs for Success (1993), p. 61 — a secondary source, published after Maslow’s death.
  • The same Wikiquote page carries a separate, sourced Maslow sentence on the identical theme, credited to Toward a Psychology of Being; a scan of the book’s Introduction ↗ confirms the wording — “the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short” — on p. 4 of the second edition.
  • The book itself is catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗ as the 1962 Van Nostrand first edition, Princeton, New Jersey; the Whitt paperback is catalogued at Open Library ↗.
  • Quote Investigator has published no study of this line, and searches of Maslow’s published books turned up no printing of the popular wording — which is why it stays at attributed rather than verified.

Rights cannot be settled because the work containing this exact wording has never been identified. What is certain is that nothing here is public domain: Maslow published from the 1930s until his death in 1970, so any text of his carrying the line would postdate the 1931 US cut-off, and the documented cousin sentence sits in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962; 2nd ed. 1968), which remains in copyright. Treat the line as unsourced and quote it sparingly with attribution.

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

The sourcing problem

Nobody else is claiming this sentence, so the trouble is not a rival author. It is thinner than that, and harder to fix: no edition, transcript or letter of Maslow’s has ever been produced that contains it.

Jim Whitt, Road Signs for Success (1993) earliest citation found

Wikiquote ↗ files the line in its “Attributed” section and cites one source for it: p. 61 of this motivational paperback, published in 1993. Maslow died in 1970. Open Library’s record ↗ lists it under the J. Whitt & Co. imprint.

Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being sourced

What Maslow verifiably wrote is close in sense and quite different in shape: “Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.” It appears in the Introduction, ‘Toward a Psychology of Health’ ↗, p. 4 of the second edition.

Commercial quote databases no citation

The sites that put this line in front of most readers carry it bare — no book, no page, no date, and in places a stray year that nothing supports. A quotation that circulates for decades without a single page reference is one that probably entered circulation through talks and posters rather than print.

Maslow may well have said it; it is his idea, in something like his idiom. But until an edition, a lecture transcript or a letter is produced, the honest label is attributed — and the sentence that can actually be cited is the one in Toward a Psychology of Being ↗.

Context

Why the line lands

Maslow’s whole career was one long argument that psychology had built its picture of humanity out of the wrong sample. It studied the broken, the anxious and the institutionalised, then generalised. His counter-move was to study the people who were flourishing — and what he concluded was that our estimate of what a person can be had been set far too low.

So the popular one-liner is not out of character; it is the argument boiled down to a bumper sticker. The catch is that the boiling appears to have been done by somebody else. The version that carries a page number reads: “Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be. In fact it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.”

Maslow’s documented sentence is about the possibilities of human nature. The famous one is about you.

What changed in the retelling

The documented sentence is a claim about a discipline: psychology has sold human nature short. The circulating version relocates the failure inside the individual — men and women selling themselves short — which is what makes it quotable on a motivational poster and useless as a citation.

That shift is exactly the kind of drift that happens when a line travels through speeches and seminars before it reaches print. It is also why the trail runs cold: there is no edition to check, because the sentence in circulation may never have been an edition’s sentence.

Explore

Filed under

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

Growth Courage Purpose

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.

Abraham Maslow — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Files this line under “Attributed” with a single secondary citation (Whitt, 1993), and carries the sourced Toward a Psychology of Being sentence separately.
Toward a Psychology of Being — Introduction (PDF)faculty.sfcc.spokane.edu

Scan of the second edition’s Introduction, containing Maslow’s documented “sold short” sentence on p. 4.
Toward a Psychology of Being (1962 first edition)archive.org

Internet Archive catalogue record for the Van Nostrand first edition, Princeton, 1962.
Road Signs for Success — Jim Whittopenlibrary.org

Catalogue record for the motivational paperback that is the earliest located citation of the popular wording.
Abraham Maslow — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography, life dates, and the publication chronology of Maslow’s books.

The man who thought we underrate ourselves

Who was Abraham Maslow?

Abraham Maslow

1908–1970 · American psychologist · Brandeis University

Abraham Maslow was the American psychologist who insisted that his field had learned everything it knew from the sick and almost nothing from the well. Against the Freudian and behaviourist mainstream he built a “third force” psychology of growth, peak experience and self-actualization, set out in Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962). He taught at Brooklyn College and then Brandeis, and died in 1970, a year before The Farther Reaches of Human Nature appeared.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this page

Earliest citation located: Jim Whitt, Road Signs for Success (J. Whitt & Co., 1993), 61, as recorded in Wikiquote’s “Attributed” section. No primary Maslow source found. Compare Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968), Introduction, 4.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-story-of-the-human-race-is-the-story-of-men-and-women/

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