The familiar wording is Jordan’s own, printed in his memoir The Days of a Man, Volume One (World Book Company, 1922), page 479, where he gives it as the “code of power” by which the railroad baron Collis P. Huntington was “currently described.” Upton Sinclair did put a version of the saying in print in The Goose-Step (1923) — but he credited it to “Dr. Jordan” in the same sentence, and his wording is not the one that circulates.
“Whatever is Not Nailed Down is Mine and Whatever I Can Pry Loose is Not Nailed Down” David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man, Volume One (World Book Company, 1922), p. 479, describing Collis P. Huntington’s reputed “code of power.” Often miscredited to Upton Sinclair, who quoted it in 1923 while crediting Jordan, and to Huntington himself, for whom no evidence exists. · Verbatim: “Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Upton Sinclair. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
Where the wording actually comes from
Work
The Days of a Man, Volume One (1851–1899)
Author
David Starr Jordan
Published
World Book Company, Yonkers-on-Hudson, 1922 — page 479
Earlier form
Two separate maxims in Jordan’s The Call of the Nation (American Unitarian Association, 1910), page 32
Huntington, as is well known, maintained a rigid code of ethics of his own framing. It was, however, a code of power, currently described about as follows: “Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
The Days of a Man, Vol. 1, p. 479
Note Jordan’s hedge: the code is “currently described” this way. He never claims Huntington spoke the words — and Huntington had been dead since 1900.
1910 — Jordan prints the saying as two separate maxims in The Call of the Nation ↗, page 32: “Whatever is not nailed down is mine.” This is the motto of the exploiter. “Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down.” No individual is named.
1922 — In his memoir The Days of a Man ↗, page 479, Jordan attaches the now-familiar single-speaker wording to Collis P. Huntington, calling it a “code of power” — a description of the man, not a quotation from him.
1923 — Upton Sinclair repeats the charge in The Goose-Step ↗, chapter XXXII, writing “Dr. Jordan described Huntington’s motto as…” and giving it in different words from the popular version.
1968 onward — writers begin putting the sentence in Huntington’s own mouth, in The Atlantic and then New York magazine; Quote Investigator ↗ tracks the drift and finds no evidence Huntington ever used it.
✓Public domain
The wording quoted here is from The Days of a Man, Volume One, published by World Book Company in 1922, and the earlier form is from The Call of the Nation (1910); US works published before 1931 are in the public domain, as is Upton Sinclair’s The Goose-Step of 1923. All three may be quoted and reproduced freely.
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 names get the credit. Neither claimed it.
This saying travels with a famous byline attached, and it has been attached to two different men — one who quoted it and named his source, and one who was dead before it appeared in print.
✕
The credit you probably sawUpton Sinclair Quoted it — and credited Jordan
Sinclair really did print the saying, in The Goose-Step ↗ (1923), his study of American education. But the sentence he wrote is “Dr. Jordan described Huntington’s motto as: ‘Anything is mine that is not nailed down, and nothing is nailed that I can pry loose.’” The attribution is inside the quotation, and the wording is not the one that circulates today.
✕
The bigger mythCollis P. Huntington No evidence
Quote sites hand the line to the railroad baron as a personal motto. Quote Investigator ↗ found no substantive evidence he ever said it: Huntington died in 1900 ↗, and the earliest appearance QI documents is Jordan’s book of 1910.
~
Also swept inRichard Ballinger and the Northwest fisheries Targets, not authors
Jordan aimed the same line at President Taft’s Interior Secretary in a July 1910 New York Times interview and at Alaska and Washington fishing interests in 1915 and 1918, according to Quote Investigator ↗. They were the accused, never the speakers — the same move that later stuck the words to Huntington.
✓The wording that circulates today is Jordan’s own sentence about Huntington, printed in The Days of a Man ↗ in 1922 — an accusation by a critic, not a confession by a tycoon (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
A conservationist’s accusation, not a tycoon’s boast
Jordan wrote the line as conservation politics. In The Call of the Nation (1910) he argued that the United States had handed away its land, forests, coal and water power to anyone who asked, and set down “Whatever is not nailed down is mine” as “the motto of the exploiter,” following it with a second maxim — “Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down” — that turns the first into a joke about how much can be levered away.
In his 1922 memoir he aimed both halves at one man: Collis P. Huntington, the Central Pacific baron whom Jordan, as Stanford’s president, blamed for endangering the fortune that funded the university. Jordan was careful in how he put it — Huntington’s code was “currently described” this way, he wrote, not spoken by Huntington — but that caution did not survive the retellings.
A critic’s caricature, reprinted often enough, became the villain’s own boast.
The chain of retellings
Jordan reused the saying for years against targets he disapproved of: Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger in a July 1910 New York Times interview, Alaska fisheries interests at a 1915 American Fisheries Society meeting, and again in 1918 on overfishing — each time as a philosophy he opposed, never as words anyone had actually spoken, as documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
By 1968 a reviewer in The Atlantic could describe it as “a remark … attributed to Huntington himself,” and a 1974 New York magazine article printed it as Huntington’s candor. Neither traced it back to Jordan, and the chain of paraphrase quietly moved the sentence from the accuser to the accused (Quote Investigator ↗).
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1851–1931 · Ichthyologist, founding president of Stanford University
David Starr Jordan was an ichthyologist who served as the seventh president of Indiana University before becoming the founding president of Stanford University in 1891, staying in the post until 1913 and then serving as the university’s first chancellor until 1916. Outside the campus he was a conservationist and an outspoken antimilitarist, leading the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914. He was also, less creditably, a committed supporter of eugenics — a strand of his public work that sits uneasily beside the reformist voice that produced this line.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy, vol. 1, 1851–1899 (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1922), 479. Earlier form: Jordan, The Call of the Nation: A Plea for Taking Politics Out of Politics (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910), 32.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Whatever is Not Nailed Down is Mine and Whatever I Can Pry Loose is Not Nailed Down’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/whatever-is-not-nailed-down-is-mine-and-whatever-i-can-pry/