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Who really said it

You Don't Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It

Not Samuel Johnson — actually John Brunner John Brunner 1934–1995 · British science-fiction novelist
Disputed In copyright

Johnson said something close, but not this. In April 1775, browsing a friend’s library, he told the room that “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson). The compressed modern sentence belongs to the science-fiction writer John Brunner: the earliest exact match in Quote Investigator’s chronology is a line of dialogue in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.

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

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“You Don't Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It” John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider (1975). Often credited to Samuel Johnson, whose genuine 1775 remark was different: "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of John Brunner; the novel was first published by Harper & Row, New York, 1975). 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 John Brunner — British science-fiction novelist · Hugo Award winner. Theme: "You Don't Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It". 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 "You Don't Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It". 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

Where the sentence actually appears

Work
The Shockwave Rider
First published
1975, Harper & Row, New York
Form
A character’s line of dialogue; page 75 of the Del Rey/Ballantine printing verified by Quote Investigator
Earlier variant
Stand on Zanzibar (1968): “You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.”

Ah, you don’t have to know everything. You just have to know where to find it. The Shockwave Rider, 1975

A line of dialogue in Brunner’s 1975 novel, transcribed by Quote Investigator from page 75 of the Del Rey/Ballantine printing. Brunner had used a near-identical line seven years earlier in Stand on Zanzibar.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1775 to 1975

How the saying got here

  • 1775 — At Mr. Cambridge’s villa on the Thames near Twickenham, Johnson makes straight for the bookshelves and, challenged about it, replies: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Boswell dates the visit Tuesday, 18 April 1775 (Life of Johnson).
  • 1921 — In Boston, Einstein is asked the speed of sound and declines to answer, saying the figure is readily available in textbooks; a fuller telling published in 1947 has him say he does not burden his memory with facts he can find in any textbook. This is the root of the Einstein version (Quote Investigator).
  • 1968 — John Brunner gives a character in Stand on Zanzibar the near-final form: “You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.” (Quote Investigator)
  • 1975 — Brunner returns to the line in The Shockwave Rider, in the form that circulates today — the earliest exact match in QI’s chronology.
In copyright

The exact sentence is documented in a novel first published in 1975, well inside US copyright, so it is reproduced here only as a brief excerpt for identification and comment — not as public-domain text. Samuel Johnson’s different 1775 remark, printed in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), is long out of copyright.

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 big names, neither of them the author

This sentence travels under two famous names, and the record supports neither for this wording.

Samuel Johnson Right idea, wrong words

Johnson really did say that knowledge is of two kinds — knowing a subject, or knowing where to find information on it — at Mr. Cambridge’s villa on 18 April 1775, as Boswell records. But the compressed modern sentence is not in Boswell, and Wikiquote’s sourced Johnson list carries only the 1775 wording.

Albert Einstein No source

Aggregators still print “I don’t need to know everything, I just need to know where to find it, when I need it” over Einstein’s name (AZQuotes). Quote Investigator found no matching line in his writings and notes it is absent from Princeton’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein; what Einstein actually did, in Boston in 1921, was decline to state the speed of sound because the figure was available in any textbook (Quote Investigator).

The exact sentence is documented in John Brunner’s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider — the earliest exact match in Quote Investigator’s chronology, which runs from Johnson in 1775 through several looser variants to Brunner.

Context

Why Johnson gets the credit

The thought is genuinely Johnson’s, and older than the internet by two centuries. On Tuesday 18 April 1775, Boswell and Sir Joshua Reynolds took Johnson to dine at Mr. Cambridge’s villa on the Thames near Twickenham. Johnson made straight for the bookshelves; when his host remarked that it seemed odd to want to look at the backs of books, Johnson — “ever ready for contest” — wheeled round and delivered the answer that has been quoted ever since (Life of Johnson).

What changed was the packaging. Johnson’s two-part sentence is an argument about catalogues and libraries; the modern one-liner is a slogan for the search-engine age, and it arrives fully formed in a 1975 novel about a man on the run through a national data network. That the same page of thinking should be credited to a lexicographer of 1775 and to a physicist who died in 1955 says more about how quotations travel than about who wrote them.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

The stepping stones between 1775 and 1975

Quote Investigator’s chronology records the idea surfacing repeatedly in different words: a 1914 advertisement in The Expositor and Current Anecdotes holding that educated people are those who know where to find information at a moment’s notice, a similar remark in The Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor in 1917, and the social reformer Sophonisba Breckinridge telling her University of Chicago students, in an account published in 1958, that they did not have to know everything but should learn how and where to find what they needed (Quote Investigator).

Brunner used the idea twice. A character in Stand on Zanzibar (1968) says you do not have to know everything, you simply need to know where to find it when necessary; the tighter version that circulates today appears in The Shockwave Rider seven years later.

Explore

Filed under

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

Knowledge Wisdom Humility

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: the full chronology, 1775 to 1975quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: Johnson in 1775, Einstein in 1921, Breckinridge in 1958, and Brunner’s exact wording in 1975.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, Volume 2 (1765–1776)gutenberg.org

Full text of Boswell’s account of 18 April 1775, including Johnson’s “Knowledge is of two kinds” reply.
Wikiquote: Samuel Johnsonen.wikiquote.org

Lists the 1775 line among the sourced Boswell quotations; the modern sentence appears nowhere on the page.
“Knowledge is of two kinds” — the passage in contextsamueljohnson.com

A Johnson quotation site reproducing the passage and dating it 18 April 1775, with the library setting.
The Shockwave Rideren.wikipedia.org

Publication details for the 1975 Harper & Row novel in which the exact sentence is documented.
John Brunner (author)en.wikipedia.org

Life dates, Hugo Award, and the sequence of novels the line sits inside.

The man who actually wrote the line

Who was John Brunner?

John Brunner

1934–1995 · British science-fiction novelist · Hugo Award winner

John Kilian Houston Brunner was a prolific British science-fiction writer whose bleak, prophetic novels of the late 1960s and 1970s — Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider — extrapolated overpopulation, ecological collapse and the networked society. Stand on Zanzibar won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969. The Shockwave Rider is best remembered for coining the computing sense of “worm” — and, in passing, for a throwaway line about knowledge that long ago outran its author’s name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this source

John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); the line appears on page 75 of the Del Rey/Ballantine printing verified by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: You Don’t Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It” (2 April 2012). Compare James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), under 18 April 1775: “Knowledge is of two kinds…”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You Don't Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-dont-have-to-know-everything-you-just-have-to-know/

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