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Who really said it

War does not determine who is right — only who is left

Not Andrew Carnegie — an anonymous newspaper line from 1931 Unknown — anonymous in its first printing First in print 22 August 1931 · The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, unsigned
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Carnegie died in 1919. The right/left version of this line does not reach print until 22 August 1931, twelve years later, in an unsigned column of one-liners in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix — and it carries no author’s name at all. Carnegie did say something in the neighbourhood: presiding at Carnegie Hall on 15 April 1907, he told the National Arbitration and Peace Congress that ‘War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers.’ That is a right/wrong sentence with a might/right pun in it — not the right/left joke. And when a tighter version of his own line reached The New York Times in January 1911, Quote Investigator records that Carnegie put it in the mouth of an anonymous ‘they’ rather than claiming it himself (see the chronology ↗).

Last verified 30 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left” Not Andrew Carnegie. An anonymous newspaper epigram, first printed unsigned in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 22 August 1931. Carnegie's own 1907 sentence was different: 'War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers.'

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

Can you use it?

We can date this wording but not attribute it — no author, no located original, and 1931 is just inside copyright — so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an anonymous line, dated to its earliest known printing; just don’t assert a specific author.

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

In context

Evoking the themes of truth, mortality and justice. Theme: "War does not determine who is right — only who is left". 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 "War does not determine who is right — only who is left". 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 source — and the near-miss

Earliest printing
‘The Daily Starbeams’, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
Dated
22 August 1931 — unsigned, no author given
Modern wording
The Reader’s Digest, February 1932, credited to the Montreal Star
Carnegie source
None for this wording — his real 1907 line is a different pun

Leaving out of sight material interests, the savagery of war, from a moral and religious point of view, cries aloud to civilized man and rouses him to the firm resolve that it shall disgrace our civilization no longer. War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers. Andrew Carnegie, National Arbitration and Peace Congress, Carnegie Hall, 15 April 1907

This is the closest thing Carnegie is documented as saying, and reading it settles the question. His pun is might against right, and his point is that war reveals the wrongdoer while force takes the field anyway. The famous line does something else entirely: it drops the moral question and counts the survivors. Same subject, different joke, different author.

Scanned proceedings (1907), full view
Read Carnegie’s address on page 52 of the 1907 Proceedings
Quote Investigator — the full chronology, 1819 to 2013

How we traced it

  • Start where the wording actually starts. Quote Investigator puts the first known appearance of the right/left form in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix of 22 August 1931, in a column of unsigned one-liners called ‘The Daily Starbeams’: ‘War does not determine who is right.’ It only determines who is left. No author, no speaker, no occasion — just filler the chronology ↗.
  • The next appearance QI records is the February 1932 Reader’s Digest, which printed the wording everyone now quotes and credited it to the Montreal Star — a newspaper, not a person. QI notes the Star closed in 1979 and that it could not search the relevant pages, so whoever wrote it there may still be found. Barry Popik’s independent file reaches the same 1932 Digest item Popik’s citations ↗.
  • We then read Carnegie’s real sentence in the primary source rather than taking it second-hand. In the Proceedings of the National Arbitration and Peace Congress (New York, 1907), the Second Session opens in Carnegie Hall on the afternoon of Monday 15 April 1907 with Carnegie presiding; his address begins on page 51, and on page 52 he says ‘War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers.’ A right/wrong sentence with a might/right pun — not the line in question the scanned Proceedings ↗.
  • We also checked his own book, and his own disclaimer. The full text of the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie contains neither ‘who is left’ nor ‘who is right’ anywhere in it the full text ↗. And QI records that when a tighter version of his 1907 line reached The New York Times in January 1911, Carnegie assigned it to an anonymous ‘they’ instead of taking credit QI on the 1911 remark ↗.

The popular wording has no identified author. Its earliest located printing is an unsigned filler item in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix of 22 August 1931, and the Reader’s Digest version of February 1932 credits only the Montreal Star — a paper that closed in 1979 and whose relevant pages Quote Investigator was unable to search. With no author, no located original, and a first appearance that falls just outside the pre-1931 window, we assert no reuse status for it. Kept separate: the one text on this page that is unambiguously free is Carnegie’s actual 1907 address, published in the congress Proceedings that same year and carried in full view by the Internet Archive. This is not legal advice.

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

Three famous names, none of them the author

This line has been signed by an industrialist, a philosopher and a wartime prime minister — and a fourth name, Thomas Jefferson, rides along on a different sentence entirely. They cannot all have written it, and in fact none of them did — the only thing they have in common is being more famous than an unsigned newspaper filler item from Saskatchewan.

Not Andrew Carnegie died 1919; wrong pun; even his own version he credited to others

Carnegie died on 11 August 1919, twelve years before the earliest known printing of this wording. What he really said, on page 52 of the 1907 congress Proceedings, is ‘War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers’ — right/wrong, not right/left the scanned Proceedings ↗. When a shorter form of that same line ran in The New York Times in January 1911, Quote Investigator records that he credited an anonymous ‘they’ with it rather than himself.

Not Bertrand Russell no source; first seen in 2001

By far the most widespread version of the false credit, and the one Quote Investigator was asked about. QI ‘has found no substantive evidence that Bertrand Russell wrote or spoke this adage’, and the earliest Russell attribution it locates is a 2001 letter to a Nebraska newspaper — Russell having died in 1970 QI on the Russell credit ↗. Wikiquote’s Russell page does not carry it either, in any section Wikiquote: Russell ↗.

Not Winston Churchill no source; 2013

The Churchill credit is late and thin. QI documents it in a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press in 2013, which framed it as something Churchill said after the First World War — more than eighty years after the saying was already circulating anonymously the chronology ↗.

Not Thomas Jefferson unsupported, and a different sentence

In 1914 a Winston-Salem, North Carolina newspaper printed ‘War never decides any question of right or wrong.—Thomas Jefferson.’ That is not this line, and QI has located no substantive support for the ascription at all the chronology ↗.

There is no canonical form determine / decide / settle; war / force / the atom bomb

The 1931 original reads ‘War does not determine who is right.’ It only determines who is left. Then: ‘only who is left’ (1932), ‘The next war will not decide who is right but who is left’ (1932), ‘force does not prove who is right; only who is left’ (1932), ‘War never determines who is right, but only who is left’ (1936), ‘War may not determine who is right but it does definitely determine who is left’ (1937), and the atom bomb substituted for war in 1946. A saying with this many wordings and this many candidate authors is telling you it belongs to no one.

An anonymous newspaper epigram. Its earliest documented appearance is unsigned, in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix of 22 August 1931; the February 1932 Reader’s Digest credited only the Montreal Star. Andrew Carnegie’s genuine 1907 remark is a different saying, and no evidence connects Russell, Churchill or Jefferson to any version Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗.

Context

Why the credit keeps moving

The pun is the whole quote. ‘Right’ and ‘left’ are opposites in one sense and completely unrelated in another, and the line pivots on exactly that: you brace for a moral verdict and get a body count instead. Jokes built that tightly travel very well, and they travel without their authors — which is why the first person known to have printed this one is nobody at all, in a Saskatchewan newspaper filler column in 1931.

Then it goes looking for a signature. A line this good needs a famous pacifist, and there is a short list of candidates: Carnegie, who spent a fortune on arbitration and the Peace Palace at The Hague; Bertrand Russell, who went to prison over the First World War; and Churchill, who gets credited with everything. Quote Investigator can date the Russell credit no earlier than 2001 and the Churchill credit to 2013. Both are decades after the men themselves died, and neither is anywhere near 1931.

You brace for a moral verdict. The line hands you a body count.

The saying, decade by decade

1819: George Nicholson, On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals — war ‘only determines which party is the most ferocious and savage’. The idea, with no pun.

1875: The Arbitrator, London — ‘war does not decide who is right or who is wrong but simply who is strongest’.

1896: The Boston Post — ‘War does not decide what is right, but what is strongest. It never decides a moral principle.’

15 April 1907: Andrew Carnegie at Carnegie Hall — ‘War never settles who is right but who is wrong. Might, not right, conquers.’

1909: a lecture published in a Yale Divinity School collection — ‘war never decides who is right, but only who is mightiest’.

8 January 1911: Carnegie’s tighter version in The New York Times, which he attributes to an anonymous ‘they’.

22 August 1931: The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix — the right/left pun in print for the first time, unsigned.

February 1932: The Reader’s Digest prints the modern wording and credits the Montreal Star, not a person.

24 February 1932: Col. Frank P. Hobgood tells Greensboro Rotarians ‘The next war will not decide who is right but who is left’ — the first named human on record using it, and already borrowing.

April 1932: Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre — ‘force does not prove who is right; only who is left’.

1936: the syndicated ‘Office Cat’ column — ‘War never determines who is right, but only who is left.’

1946: The Rotarian swaps war for the atom bomb.

2001, then 2013: the credit is handed to Bertrand Russell, then to Winston Churchill.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Mortality Justice

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: War Does Not Determine Who Is Right — Only Who Is Leftquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor research: the full chronology from 1819 to 2013, the unsigned 1931 first appearance, Carnegie’s two genuine and different remarks, and the finding that the Russell credit is spurious.
“War doesn’t determine who’s right, only who’s left”barrypopik.com

Barry Popik’s independent citation file — the February 1932 Reader’s Digest item credited to the Montreal Star, the April 1932 Sayre version, and no documented evidence for Russell.
Proceedings of the National Arbitration and Peace Congress, New York, 1907archive.org

The primary source, free full view. Carnegie’s address begins on page 51; the real sentence — ‘War never settles who is right but who is wrong’ — is on page 52.
Autobiography of Andrew Carnegiegutenberg.org

Carnegie’s own memoir, free full text. Searching it turns up neither ‘who is left’ nor ‘who is right’ anywhere in the book.
Andrew Carnegie — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s Carnegie page. Neither this saying nor ‘Might, not right, conquers’ appears on it in any section.
Andrew Carnegieen.wikipedia.org

Life dates — 25 November 1835 to 11 August 1919 — and his turn to pacifism after 1898, including the $1.5 million he gave in 1903 toward the Peace Palace at The Hague.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

1835–1919 · Scottish-American industrialist, philanthropist & peace campaigner

Andrew Carnegie made the largest steel fortune in America and then spent the rest of his life giving it away — libraries, universities, and, after 1898, the cause of international arbitration. He put $1.5 million into the Peace Palace at The Hague in 1903 and founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. So the credit is not absurd: this is genuinely the kind of thing he said, and he said a version of it, on the record, at Carnegie Hall in 1907. But his sentence turns on might and right, and it is about war exposing the wrongdoer — not about counting survivors. The right/left pun is a different, later, anonymous line, and Carnegie was dead twelve years before anyone is known to have printed it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Anonymous newspaper epigram, first printed 22 August 1931

Unattributed filler item. “The Daily Starbeams,” The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), 22 August 1931, 11 — earliest documented appearance located by Quote Investigator. Modern wording: “Patter,” The Reader’s Digest 20 (February 1932): 108, credited to the Montreal Star. Andrew Carnegie’s genuine and quite different remark: Proceedings of the National Arbitration and Peace Congress, New York, April 14th to 17th, 1907 (New York, 1907), 52.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘War does not determine who is right — only who is left’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/war-does-not-determine-who-is-right-only-who-is-left/

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