If you find a man seeking only the affection of those who are great, depend upon it he is ambitious and self-seeking but when you observe that a man seeks the affection of those who can do nothing for him, but for whom he must do everything, you know that he is not seeking himself, but that pure benevolence sways his heart. I think you may judge of a man’s character by the persons whose affection he seeks. QI believes that the central theme of the adage was prefigured in the words of Spurgeon : The following passage appeared in a sermon that he delivered in 1876. In the nineteenth century Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a leading preacher in England.
Click here to read the other article.īelow are additional selected citations in chronological order. QI has also examined a related saying: If you want to know what a man’s like, look at how he treats his inferiors. The attachment of the quotation to the notable figures Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears to be unsupported by current evidence. But QI has not yet located any evidence of use before 1974 for either woman. The famous advice giving sisters Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers used versions of this saying in the 1970s. The version of the adage in “The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm” is available in the database. Today a visitor to the Forbes magazine website can search a quotation database maintained by the publisher called “Thoughts on the Business of Life” that contains more than 10,000 entries. “You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.” This title was constructed as wordplay on the well-known doctrinal work “The Sayings of Chairman Mao” also called “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung” or “The Little Red Book”.Ī close variant of the saying under investigation was presented in the book and featured prominently in multiple advertisements that appeared in the New Yorker magazine for the collection in 1979 : In 1978 Forbes published a collection of his own quotations called “The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm”. Remembered Quote: “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”-Malcolm S. He credited the well-known magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes in 1972 : The earliest close match for this saying that QI has located appeared in the popular newspaper column of Earl Wilson. Interestingly, members of this set have been employed by (or attributed to) a wide variety of individuals including: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Johnson, Ann Landers, Abigail Van Buren, Malcolm Forbes, Paul Eldridge, James D. Quote Investigator: QI agrees that these two expressions and several others can be grouped together because they are semantically closely aligned. The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.Ĭan you help determine the origin of this saying? You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.Īs I searched further I found a similar quotation with additional attributions:
Miles? Dan Reeves?ĭear Quote Investigator: I am attempting to verify the following quotation because it will appear in a forthcoming book, but I have discovered multiple attributions: Ann Landers? Abigail Van Buren? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Samuel Johnson? Malcolm Forbes? Paul Eldridge? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? James D.
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