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Who really said it

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated

Spoken by Maya Angelou 1928–2014 · American memoirist, poet and civil rights activist
Verified In copyright

Angelou said this in her interview with Claudia Tate, published in the collection Black Women Writers at Work (Continuum, New York, 1983); Quote Investigator ↗ verified the wording against scans at page 7 of the 1985 Oldcastle Books edition. She had been saying a looser version of it for years — the earliest citation QI found is a Los Angeles Times interview of 16 April 1970, where the line ran “you just must never be defeated.”

Last verified 29 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated” Maya Angelou, interview by Claudia Tate, in Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York: Continuum, 1983); wording verified at p. 7 of the 1985 Oldcastle Books edition. An earlier variant — "you just must never be defeated" — appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 16 April 1970. The widely shared "We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated" is a pronoun-shifted rewrite. Via Quotle.info. Verbatim: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Caged Bird Legacy, LLC (the Maya Angelou estate)). 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

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Provenance

The source

Work
Black Women Writers at Work
Type
Interview with Maya Angelou, conducted by Claudia Tate — spoken, then transcribed
First published
1983 · Continuum, New York · edited by Claudia Tate
Location
Page 7 of the 1985 Oldcastle Books edition, verified against scans by Quote Investigator

All my work, my life, everything is about survival. All my work is meant to say, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure. Angelou to Claudia Tate, published 1983

The two-sentence form that later travelled as an epigraph quietly drops a word: a 1995 Abilene Reporter-News article printed “the vitality and power to endure,” where Tate’s transcript has “the vitality and the power to endure” — both wordings are transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗.

Scanned first edition (Internet Archive lending library)
Black Women Writers at Work (Continuum, 1983)
Quote Investigator’s citation chronology, 1970 to 1999

How we verified this

  • 16 April 1970 — the earliest citation on record. The Los Angeles Times reported Angelou’s motives for writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, quoting her: “I wanted to say to all girls, ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you just must never be defeated.’” Quote Investigator ↗ cites Maggie Savoy’s article “Faith of Black Woman in a World Full of Conflict,” quote page 8, column 2.
  • 1983 — the wording everyone quotes. Claudia Tate’s interview collection Black Women Writers at Work carries Angelou’s sentence in its now-familiar form. The Internet Archive’s record for the first edition ↗ confirms the publisher and year — New York: Continuum, 1983 — and QI reports verifying the quotation against scans at page 7 of the 1985 Oldcastle Books printing.
  • 1989 to 1999 — how it spread. The Tate interview was reprinted in Conversations with Maya Angelou ↗ (University Press of Mississippi, 1989), which QI cites at page 152, and again in Joanne M. Braxton’s Caged Bird casebook (Oxford University Press, 1999) at page 154. Angelou was still using the line in a 1998 interview about Down in the Delta, the film she directed.
  • What the reference sites show. Wikiquote’s Maya Angelou page ↗ carries only the altered “We may encounter…” form, filed under “Quotes about Maya Angelou” and footnoted to a link for the poem Phenomenal Woman — so the properly sourced trail for this line is QI’s, not Wikiquote’s.
In copyright

This is a spoken remark from a book first published in 1983 — far too recent for the public domain in the United States, where protection now reaches works published from 1931 onward. Angelou’s words are licensed by her estate’s entity, Caged Bird Legacy, LLC ↗, and the interview collection itself is Claudia Tate’s, published by Continuum. Even the earliest known version, in a 1970 newspaper interview, is well inside 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

A wording note

The attribution here is sound — these are Angelou’s own words, spoken more than once. What drifts is the pronoun and the supposed source.

Maya Angelou (as actually spoken) Variant wording

The version that dominates sharing is “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated” — and that is the only form Wikiquote’s Maya Angelou page ↗ carries. But all four wordings using this construction that Quote Investigator reproduces ↗ — 1970, 1983, 1995 and 1998 — read “you,” not “we.” Angelou was addressing someone, not including herself.

Mis-sourced, not misattributed Wrong source

Reference sites and inspirational reprints attach this to her poetry — Wikiquote’s footnote for it is a link to Phenomenal Woman. In fact every citation QI documents ↗ is an interview or a reprint of one. The 1970 newspaper appearance is Angelou talking about why she wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, not a sentence printed inside that book.

Maya Angelou, Los Angeles Times Earlier form

The oldest citation reads “You may encounter many defeats, but you just must never be defeated” — two extra words and a different negative. By the Tate interview the sentence had tightened to the version we know. A 1979 Lexington Herald interview shows a third shape entirely: “I believe it may be necessary to encounter many defeats … without being defeated by them” (both transcribed by QI ↗).

Genuinely Maya Angelou, and genuinely in this wording — spoken to Claudia Tate and published in Black Women Writers at Work in 1983, with the same thought on record in her interviews from 1970 onward ↗. Only the pronoun and the alleged source have been altered in transit.

Context

Why it mattered

Angelou did not offer this as a stray inspirational line. In the Tate interview it is the sentence she reaches for when asked what her writing is for — she puts survival at the centre of the whole body of work, then supplies this as its message, and immediately complicates it: the defeats are not obstacles to endurance but the thing that manufactures it.

The 1970 version tells you who she had in mind. Explaining I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to the Los Angeles Times, she said she meant to write it “to black girls, to say ‘you can win’” — and found it had come out addressed to every girl who read it. The second person in “you must not be defeated” is doing real work, which is exactly what the popular “we” rewrite sands off.

All my work, my life, everything is about survival.

The line across three decades of interviews

1979, Lexington, Kentucky. Asked whether early adversity had embittered her, Angelou drew a distinction between bitterness and anger — bitterness “eats away at you,” anger “purges, and can help you” — and then reached for the defeat idea again in looser form, adding: “Trials shape and mold you.” QI cites Eileen Levy’s interview of 12 April 1979 ↗.

1998, on film. Angelou directed the feature Down in the Delta, and when asked for its central message she gave this sentence verbatim, then glossed it: “When you encounter defeats, you find out who you are, what you can rise up from.” QI cites a Courier-Post interview of 20 December 1998 ↗.

Why the attribution held up. Angelou is one of the most heavily faked names in quotation — unsourced aphorisms attach to her constantly. This one survives scrutiny for the ordinary reason: there is a datable interview behind it, a named interviewer, a publisher, and a page that a researcher has read.

Explore

Filed under

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

Resilience Courage Failure

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: You May Encounter Many Defeats, But You Must Not Be Defeatedquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: the 1970 Los Angeles Times version, the 1983 Claudia Tate interview that fixed the familiar wording, and the reprints through 1999, with full bibliographic notes.
Black Women Writers at Work (Continuum, 1983)archive.org

Scanned first edition of Claudia Tate’s interview collection — the book containing this wording. Catalogue record confirms New York: Continuum, 1983, associated with Tate.
Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)archive.org

The University Press of Mississippi volume in the Literary Conversations series that reprinted the Tate interview and carried the line to a wider readership.
Maya Angelouen.wikiquote.org

Useful as a caution: it carries only the altered “We may encounter…” form, filed under “Quotes about Maya Angelou” and footnoted to a Poetry Foundation link for Phenomenal Woman.
Maya Angelouen.wikipedia.org

Biography and bibliography: 1928–2014, memoirist, essayist, poet and civil rights activist, seven autobiographies beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
Caged Bird Legacy — the official Maya Angelou sitemayaangelou.com

The estate’s own site, whose pages carry “Copyright © 2025 by Caged Bird Legacy, LLC” — the entity that administers licensing of her words.

The author

About Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

1928–2014 · American memoirist, poet and civil rights activist

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several volumes of poetry, and is credited with plays, films and television work spanning over fifty years. The first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), brought her international recognition; in 1998 she directed the feature film Down in the Delta. Survival was the theme she claimed for the whole body of work — “All my work, my life, everything is about survival” — which is the sentence this quotation was offered to explain.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Maya Angelou, interview by Claudia Tate, in Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York: Continuum, 1983), quotation verified at page 7 of the Oldcastle Books edition (Harpenden, 1985). Earlier variant: Maggie Savoy, “Faith of Black Woman in a World Full of Conflict,” Los Angeles Times, 16 April 1970, quote page 8.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-may-encounter-many-defeats-but-you-must-not-be-defeated/

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