Who said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt"?

Answer 1

Abraham Lincoln

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THANKS

Answer 2

Abraham Lincoln.

Answer 3

The 16th President Abraham Lincoln said it.

Answer 4

This is a very old maxim or adage, and it is not possible to attribute it to any one individual.

Although some credit this quote to Abraham Lincoln, others to Mark Twain, and others to Samuel Johnson (apocryphally) , it evidently is much, much older than all of these, and they are probably paraphrasing from Scriptures, or repeating an old adage.

Here is what several websites state:

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"Remaining Silent
I’ve had the following quote on my blog for a while: ¶

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt — Abraham Lincoln ¶

It was pointed out to me that the attribution of that quote should have been to Mark Twain, not Abraham Lincoln. I started wondering if that could be true. I certainly did not want to propagate a misquote. Even after doing some searching on the web, I still was not able to determine the answer to my satisfaction. Bartleby, where I usually go to check quotes, did not have the quote at all. A number of sites attribute the quote to Lincoln, and just as many attribute the quote to Mark Twain. Still other sites attribute to someone else altogether. I was not able to find any reliable citations on any site. Even Ask Yahoo came up empty. ¶

The quote is clearly derived from a much earlier quote found in Proverbs 17:28 in the Míshlê Shlomoh in the Tanakh. ¶ "

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"This was a tougher nut to crack than we originally thought. Not only could we not find a definite answer to your question, we couldn't even confirm the exact wording of the quote.
Searches on "better to keep your mouth closed" and "better to remain silent" (using the quotation marks in both cases) turned up numerous web pages, all offering different versions of the phrase. Some sources quoted the saying as "It's far better...", some substituted the words "stupid," "ignorant," or "simpleton" for the word "fool," and still others twisted the saying into an almost unrecognizable form.

A page titled Mark Twain and the Mutating Quote attributed at least four variations of the same phrase to the eminently quotable Twain, explaining that it was a case of "split personality" that accounted for the variations, rather than a rash of misquotes.

Other pages suggested a number of other authors for the saying, including: Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Groucho Marx, Albert Einstein, and a mysterious figure named Silvan Engel.

In an attempt to solve this proverbial puzzle, we paid a visit to Bartleby.com, home to the online version of Familiar Quotations. Unfortunately, after searching on a number of possible keywords and potential authors, we couldn't find a single reference to this quote.

All the confusion and disagreement surrounding both the author and the wording of this saying led us to suspect that it may be a simple maxim, not attributable to any single person -- which is not to question its wisdom. "

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Editor's Note: Thanks to all of our scholarly and well-read readers who wrote in to suggest Proverbs 17:28 as a possible source of this quote.

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"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Apparently not Johnson, using the Primary Source Media CD-ROM as the judge. Nowhere in Johnson's works or letters, or contemporary biographies of him, do the phrases "remain silent" or "remove all doubt" appear in anything close to this context. In fact, the words "silent" and "fool" never appear together in a sentence.

In addition to Johnson, many other people are supposed to have said this. Sometimes people cite Abraham Lincoln; or a journalist named Silvan Engel or sometimes it's attributed to "Lincoln, quoting Silvan Engel." It also gets attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Woodrow Wilson. (You can read more in this discussion in alt.quotations, as well as this explanation at "Ask Yahoo!")

Peter Lewerin has suggested Proverbs 17:28 as an early source of the line: "Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

Answer 5

my Mother

Answer 6

I thought it was Mark Twain

Answer 7

abe lincoln

Source(s):

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/better_t...

Answer 8

i don't know