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Who really said it

There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings

Not Henry Ward Beecher — an anonymous saying popularized by Hodding Carter An unnamed “wise woman,” quoted by Hodding Carter Recorded in 1953 · Hodding Carter II, 1907–1972, Pulitzer-winning Mississippi newspaper editor
Disputed In copyright

The earliest strong match Quote Investigator could locate ↗ is in Hodding Carter’s 1953 book Where Main Street Meets the River (Rinehart & Company), page 337 — and Carter did not claim the line. He wrote that “a wise woman once said to me” it, and never named her. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence that Henry Ward Beecher, who died in 1887, ever used the expression; the Beecher credit is traceable to a 1982 Ronald Reagan message, twenty-nine years after the saying’s first documented printing and ninety-five after Beecher’s death.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings” an unnamed "wise woman," quoted by Hodding Carter in Where Main Street Meets the River (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1953), p. 337. Not Henry Ward Beecher: Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence Beecher used the expression, and the earliest Beecher attribution Quote Investigator documents is Ronald Reagan's 9 September 1982 Grandparents Day message. Verified at quotle.info. · Verbatim: “A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Henry Ward Beecher. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Hodding Carter II; originally published by Rinehart & Company, New York). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Hodding Carter II — Pulitzer-winning Mississippi newspaper editor. Theme: "There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings". 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 "There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings". 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

The earliest documented printing

Work
Where Main Street Meets the River
Author & publisher
Hodding Carter · Rinehart & Company, New York, 1953
Location
Chapter 27, “It’s How We Like It,” page 337
Credited by Carter to
An unnamed “wise woman” — not to himself, and not to Beecher

A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings. And they can only be grown, these roots and these wings, in the home. passage continues

Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗, which records the citation as verified on paper.

Quote Investigator: the 1953 Carter citation and full chronology

How we verified this

In copyright

The wording everyone quotes first appears in Where Main Street Meets the River, published by Rinehart & Company in 1953 ↗ — well after the 1931 cutoff for the United States public domain — so the passage is treated here as in copyright. Because Carter attributed the sentence to a woman he never identified, no earlier, public-domain printing of it has been found.

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

Where the credit went wrong

This is an orphan saying that has been assigned at least three famous parents, none of whom can be shown to have originated it. Hodding Carter printed it first — and disclaimed it in the same sentence.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) No supporting evidence

Quote Investigator states it found no substantive evidence that Beecher used the expression ↗. The credit surfaces in Ronald Reagan’s Grandparents Day message of 9 September 1982 ↗ — “Henry Ward Beecher once wrote” — and again in John Connally’s 1993 memoir. Beecher died in 1887, sixty-six years before the saying’s earliest documented printing, and Wikiquote’s Beecher page ↗ has no trace of it.

Jonas Salk (via Chicken Soup for the Soul, 1993) Repeater, not originator

Bettie B. Youngs’ essay in the 1993 collection reports Salk telling her that good parents “give their children roots and wings.” Quote Investigator notes this appears many years after Carter’s 1953 instance was already circulating ↗, and suspects Salk was relaying a saying he had heard.

The version now quoted everywhere Trimmed

Carter’s printed sentence reads “there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings.” The hedges came off fast: Quote Investigator records that the May 1953 Reader’s Digest reprint deleted “she said” and added quotation marks ↗, and by 1959 it was running as an anonymous adage.

Nobody knows who said it first. What is documented is that the earliest strong match is Hodding Carter’s 1953 Where Main Street Meets the River, page 337 ↗ — and Carter attributed it to a woman he never named.

Context

Why this one stuck to Beecher

The saying travelled the way most orphan aphorisms do: through condensation. Carter’s 1953 sentence is hedged and conversational — “a wise woman once said to me,” “only two,” “hope to give.” Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ shows the hedges being sanded off almost immediately: Reader’s Digest reprinted it in May 1953 with the “she said” deleted and quotation marks added, and by 1959 an Altoona newspaper was running it as an unattributed adage with no wise woman at all.

Once a line is floating free of its author, it needs one, and a famous nineteenth-century preacher is a cheap fit for anything that sounds like a sermon. The credit to Beecher becomes visible in the record on 9 September 1982, in Ronald Reagan’s Grandparents Day message ↗ — and a presidential document is exactly the kind of citation that a quotation dictionary will copy without checking.

Carter went out of his way not to take credit. Everyone since has been happy to hand it to someone else.

The other names in the file

Jonas Salk. The polio researcher is often given the “roots to know where home is, wings to fly away” variant. It reaches print in Bettie B. Youngs’ essay in the 1993 collection Chicken Soup for the Soul, where she reports Salk saying it to her. That is four decades after Carter’s book; Quote Investigator suspects Salk, if he said it, was repeating something already in circulation ↗.

A 1920 near-miss. Quote Investigator notes a 1920 Smith Alumnae Quarterly book review headed “Roots and Wings” that uses both metaphors for a young woman’s development — but it explicitly says the passage “does not really fit” the saying under investigation and treats it only as a thematic precursor, not an earlier version.

Jean Wade Rindlaub. A 1963 religious magazine quoted the advertising executive expanding the saying at an American Mothers’ Committee meeting — another repeater, not an originator.

Explore

Filed under

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

Love Growth Freedom

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 Origin: Roots and Wingsquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: the 1953 Carter citation, the full chronology from 1920 to 1999, and the finding of no substantive evidence for Beecher.
Message on the Observance of Grandparents Dayreaganlibrary.gov

Reagan's 9 September 1982 message, which credits the line to Beecher — the earliest Beecher attribution documented in the record.
Henry Ward Beecheren.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's Beecher page, which carries no roots-and-wings line in any section — sourced, attributed or disputed.
Hodding Carteren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the editor who published the earliest documented instance, listing Where Main Street Meets the River (Rinehart, 1953) among his works.
Where Main Street meets the riveropenlibrary.org

Catalog record confirming the book's 1953 first publication by Rinehart.
Carter, Hodding — Where Main Street Meets the Riverwist.info

A sourced quotation database entry for the passage, noting it is almost always quoted without Carter's note about the wise woman.

The editor who wrote it down

Who Hodding Carter actually was

Hodding Carter II

1907–1972 · Pulitzer-winning Mississippi newspaper editor

William Hodding Carter II was an American journalist who founded the Delta Star in Greenville, Mississippi and merged it into the Delta Democrat-Times, which he edited until failing eyesight led him to hand it to his son, Hodding Carter III, in 1966. He won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for pieces attacking racial intolerance, including the editorial “Go for Broke” defending Japanese American servicemen. Where Main Street Meets the River (1953) is his memoir of that newspaper career — and the book that put “roots and wings” into general circulation, though Carter carefully credited the words to someone else.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented printing

Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1953), chap. 27, “It’s How We Like It,” 337. Identified as the earliest strong match in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings,” 12 August 2014.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-two-lasting-bequests-we-can-give-our-children/

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