Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword

Not Buckminster Fuller — actually Thomas Fuller Thomas Fuller 1608–1661 · English clergyman, historian & author
Disputed Free to reuse

Thomas Fuller — the seventeenth-century English clergyman, not the twentieth-century American designer — wrote the line in The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), in his character sketch of “The Witch.” His words were “the devils rattles,” not “the devil’s toys”; Quote Investigator ↗ found no evidence that Buckminster Fuller ever said or wrote any version of it.

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

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword” NOT Buckminster Fuller. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) wrote "they which play with the devils rattles, will be brought by degrees to wield his sword" in The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), Fifth Book, ch. 3, "The Witch," p. 367. The "devil's toys" wording is a later, unsourced alteration; Quote Investigator found no evidence Buckminster Fuller ever used the line. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to R. Buckminster Fuller. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

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

In context

Evoking the world of Thomas Fuller — English clergyman, historian & author. Theme: "Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword". 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 "Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword". 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 1642 passage

Work
The Holy State and the Profane State
Location
The Fifth Book, chapter 3: “The Witch,” p. 367
First published
1642 — Cambridge, printed by Roger Daniel for John Williams
Popular wording
“devil’s toys” — a later alteration of Fuller’s “devils rattles,” origin undocumented

She begins at first with doing tricks rather strange then hurtfull: yea some of them are pretty and pleasing. But it is dangerous to gather floures that grow on the banks of the pit of hell, for fear of falling in; yea they which play with the devils rattles, will be brought by degrees to wield his sword, and from making of sport they come to doing of mischief. The Profane State (1642), Book V, ch. 3 — “The Witch”

As transcribed from the 1642 first edition by Quote Investigator ↗; “floures” is an old spelling of flowers, and the original prints “devils” without an apostrophe. The 1840 Pickering edition ↗ modernises it to “they who play with the devil’s rattles.” One curiosity, offered as an observation rather than an explanation: the word toys does appear in Fuller’s very next paragraph in that edition — “He is to find her some toys for a time” — but no source links that to the modern swap.

Digitised edition
The Holy State and the Profane State, 1840 edition, p. 295
Read the passage in the 1840 edition (Internet Archive)

How “rattles” became “toys,” and Thomas became Buckminster

  • 1642 — Thomas Fuller publishes The Holy State and the Profane State in Cambridge. In the sketch “The Witch” he writes that those who play with the devil’s rattles will by degrees wield his sword, per Quote Investigator’s transcription of the first edition ↗.
  • 1840 — William Pickering’s London edition carries the passage in modernised spelling on p. 295, still with rattles. We read it in the Internet Archive scan ↗.
  • 1902 and 1921 — the line circulates detached from its book: Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature lists it among Fuller’s “pithy shorter sayings,” and The Evening World of New York prints it with the bare tag “—Fuller,” both documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 2005 and 2010 — the Buckminster credit surfaces in print: a letter in Oregon’s Register-Guard asks whether “Buckminster Fuller” was warning about devil’s toys, and a compilation lists the line as “R. Buckminster Fuller, 1895” — 1895 being his birth year, not a date of writing. Both citations are from Quote Investigator ↗.
Public domain

Thomas Fuller’s The Holy State and the Profane State was first published in 1642 and its author died in 1661, so the text quoted here is long in the public domain worldwide; the 1840 Pickering edition we read it in is likewise free of copyright. Note that this status attaches to Fuller’s actual sentence — the popular “devil’s toys” rewording has no identifiable author or first printing at all, which is a reason to quote Fuller’s wording rather than the internet’s.

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

Two things went wrong here

This is a double error: the wrong Fuller, and the wrong word. Both are worth separating, because correcting only the name still leaves you quoting a sentence Thomas Fuller did not write.

R. Buckminster Fuller Not his

Quote Investigator ↗ reports it “has located no substantive evidence that Buckminster Fuller employed the words” and concludes the modern ascription was mistaken. The line does not appear anywhere on his Wikiquote page ↗ either.

A bare ascription: “Fuller” Surname collision

The saying circulated for decades credited only to the surname — Quote Investigator ↗ shows The Evening World printing it in 1921 as simply “—Fuller,” and suggests someone later misread that ambiguous tag and reassigned the words from Thomas to Buckminster.

“the devil’s toys” Reworded

Fuller wrote rattles. The 1840 edition ↗ reads “they who play with the devil’s rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.” No source documents who changed rattles to toys, or when.

Quote aggregators Still uncorrected

AZQuotes ↗ still files the “devil’s toys” wording under R. Buckminster Fuller, with no source and no note.

The thought is Thomas Fuller’s, from 1642. The famous wording is nobody’s — an anonymous later edit — and the famous author never touched it. See Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

Why a witch-sketch line reads like a warning about technology

Fuller was not writing about gadgets. The sentence sits in a character sketch of the witch, describing a woman who starts out doing parlour tricks — charms and spells that are, in his phrase, “pretty and pleasing” — and slides from harmless mischief into real harm. The whole passage is an escalation argument: the danger is not the first small step, it is the gradient.

That shape is why the line survived its own context. Strip out the witch and it becomes a general law about dabbling — which is precisely how a modern reader hears it, and precisely why it feels like something a systems thinker and futurist might have said about the atom bomb or the machine age. The fit is the trap: it is so plausible as Buckminster Fuller that nobody checked.

The danger is not the first small step. It is the gradient.

What Fuller actually argued in “The Witch”

Fuller’s sketch runs as a sequence: the witch begins defensively, with charms meant to protect her against the plots of enemies; she moves to tricks that are strange rather than hurtful; and only then does she, in his words, indent downright with the devil. The famous sentence is the hinge in that sequence — the moment where play becomes power.

The compressed, proverb-like phrasing is characteristic of the whole book. The Holy State and the Profane State sold out its first printing and was reprinted repeatedly, which is one reason individual sentences from it circulated for centuries with no more attribution than the bare surname “Fuller.”

Explore

Filed under

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

Character Wisdom Power

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: “They Which Play with the Devils Rattles”quoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: traces the saying to Thomas Fuller’s 1642 Profane State, tracks the bare “Fuller” ascription through 1902 and 1921, and finds no evidence for Buckminster Fuller.
Wikiquote: Thomas Fulleren.wikiquote.org

Carries the line in its authentic form — “devils rattles” — sourced to The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), “The Witch.”
The Holy State and the Profane State (1840 edition, full text)archive.org

Digitised William Pickering edition. The passage is on p. 295 — we read it there to confirm the wording independently of any quotation site.
Wikipedia: The Holy State and the Profane Stateen.wikipedia.org

Background on the 1642 book: four books of character sketches and profane biographies, reprinted repeatedly after its first run sold out.
Wikiquote: Buckminster Fulleren.wikiquote.org

Worth checking for the absence: the devil’s-toys line appears nowhere on Buckminster Fuller’s Wikiquote page, in any section.
Wikipedia: Buckminster Fulleren.wikipedia.org

The man the quote gets pinned on: American architect, systems theorist, designer and futurist, 1895–1983.

The true originator

The Fuller who actually wrote it

Thomas Fuller

1608–1661 · English clergyman, historian & author

Thomas Fuller was an English clergyman and historian, baptised in June 1608 and dead in August 1661 — and, as Wikipedia puts it, one of the first English writers able to live by his pen. His best-loved book, The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), is a gallery of short character sketches — the good widow, the good servant, the witch — written in a compressed, epigrammatic style that throws off aphorisms almost by accident. That style is exactly why his sentences travel so well without him: they sound like proverbs, and proverbs lose their authors.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Fuller, Thomas. The Holy State and the Profane State. Cambridge: Printed by Roger Daniel for John Williams, 1642. The Fifth Book, chap. 3, “The Witch,” p. 367. Passage confirmed in the modernised edition: London: William Pickering, 1840, p. 295 (Internet Archive).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/those-who-play-with-the-devils-toys-will-be-brought-by/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied