The idea is genuinely Maslow’s, but this sentence is not his. The wording quoted as Maslow’s own runs differently — “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth” — and the tidied-up “step forward / step backward” version appears in none of his published work. Wikiquote files it under Attributed and can offer only one citation: Brian Tracy’s leadership book How the Best Leaders Lead (2010), p. 35, forty years after Maslow died.
“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety” commonly credited to Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), but not found in his published writings. It is a modern rewording of his own line, "One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again." Wikiquote lists the popular version under "Attributed," citing only Brian Tracy, How the Best Leaders Lead (2010), p. 35. — Quotle.info
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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Provenance
The paper trail
Popular wording
Not found in Maslow’s published writings
Wikiquote section
Attributed — not Sourced
Only citation offered
How the Best Leaders Lead (Brian Tracy, 2010), p. 35
Maslow’s own wording
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth”
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
The real sentence
This is the wording quoted as Maslow’s own by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American ↗ — note that even there it appears without a page reference. It is not the popular “step forward / step backward” sentence, which is a later rewording.
Wikiquote’s Maslow page ↗ separates quotations with real citations — letters, Toward a Psychology of Being, Eupsychian Management (1965), The Psychology of Science (1966) — from those merely attributed. “You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety” is in the Attributed list, cited to Brian Tracy, How the Best Leaders Lead (2010), p. 35.
The sentence Maslow is actually quoted as writing runs differently: Scott Barry Kaufman opens and closes his Scientific American essay ↗ with “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again” — though he gives no book or page for it.
Maslow died on 8 June 1970 ↗, which puts the earliest citation anyone has produced for the popular wording four decades after he could have written it.
We cannot assign a rights status to a sentence with no identified source. The popular wording belongs to no documented work of Maslow’s, so there is nothing whose publication date could make it public domain — and it is certainly not free to use on that basis. Both texts it is connected to are still protected: Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being (Van Nostrand, 1962) and Brian Tracy’s How the Best Leaders Lead (2010) are each well after the 1931 US public-domain cut-off, and rights in them rest with the Maslow estate and their respective publishers.
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
What actually happened to this sentence
Maslow is one of the internet’s most reliable magnets for motivational text, and this line is a textbook case: a real idea of his, rewritten by someone else, then handed back to him with his name attached.
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The wordingAbraham Maslow paraphrase
The sentence does not appear in Maslow’s published writings. Wikiquote ↗ keeps its sourced Maslow quotations in dated sections tied to real books — Toward a Psychology of Being, Eupsychian Management, The Psychology of Science — and this line is in none of them. It sits instead in the Attributed list.
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The only citationBrian Tracy, How the Best Leaders Lead (2010) secondary source
The single reference Wikiquote can supply ↗ is p. 35 of Brian Tracy’s leadership book, published in 2010 — forty years after Maslow’s death on 8 June 1970. A business book quoting a psychologist is not evidence the psychologist wrote the words; it is evidence the wording was in circulation by then.
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A common variant“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety” variant
This longer rewrite spreads just as widely and is credited to Maslow on Goodreads ↗ with no book, year or page attached — the entry is community-submitted and unverified. Multiple confident wordings with no source between them is the signature of a paraphrase, not a quotation.
Maslow really did argue that a person stands, over and over, at a fork between defence and growth — the defence-versus-growth dialectic ↗ is one of the load-bearing ideas of his humanistic psychology, alongside the hierarchy of needs. So the popular sentence is not a lie about what he thought. It is a lie about what he wrote.
The version Maslow scholars actually quote is longer, slower and more demanding: it insists the choice has to be made repeatedly, that fear has to be beaten again and again. The circulating rewrite deletes the repetition and turns a lifelong discipline into a single dramatic step — which is precisely the shape a leadership book, a slide deck or a poster wants. That is how a paraphrase out-competes its original.
Maslow’s point was that the choice repeats. The rewrite makes it sound like it happens once.
Why we could not check the book directly
Toward a Psychology of Being was first published in 1962 by Van Nostrand in Princeton, New Jersey ↗ and remains in copyright. The Internet Archive holds scans of the first and later editions, but the full text is lending-restricted rather than open, so we could not run a page-level search against it. Where a quotation cannot be checked against the page, we say so rather than borrowing someone else’s page number.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1908–1970 · American psychologist & pioneer of humanistic psychology
Abraham Harold Maslow (1 April 1908 – 8 June 1970) was an American psychologist who spent most of his career at Brandeis University and became the best-known figure in humanistic psychology. He is remembered for the hierarchy of needs and for insisting that psychology study healthy, thriving people rather than only the sick — “it is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” His 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being carried that programme into the wider culture, which is exactly why his name became a magnet for motivational lines he never wrote.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this page
No source in Abraham Maslow's own writings has been documented for this wording. The only citation Wikiquote offers is Brian Tracy, How the Best Leaders Lead: Proven Secrets to Getting the Most Out of Yourself and Others (2010), 35, listed under "Attributed" at Wikiquote, "Abraham Maslow." Maslow's own formulation — "One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth" — is quoted as his by Scott Barry Kaufman, "Choose Growth," Scientific American (Beautiful Minds blog), without a page reference.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-will-either-step-forward-into-growth-or-you-will-step/