- According to experts, there is no evidence former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said any variation of the quote, “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
- Israeli politician Abba Eban, who died in 2002, appears to be the first to have said a version of this quote in the late 1960s, albeit with a reference to “nations,” rather than “Americans.”
- Historical records and reports indicate that people began attributing the quote to Churchill in the 1980s, long after his death in 1965.
For years, people have claimed that former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted,” or similar iterations of this quote.
One example of it was posted on Reddit as early as 2010 (archived).
The rumor recirculated on social media following the results of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections,
There’s just one problem: It has not been possible to find any evidence proving Churchill ever made such a statement.
A 2016 blog post by The Churchill Project of Hillsdale College, which is dedicated to accurately recording the politician’s legacy, reads:
We have been unable to discover [the quote] in any transcript, memoir, or published or private writings, speech, or correspondence. This is not to say that Churchill didn’t have that sentiment from time to time.
In 2013, NPR ran an audio story about how often U.S. members of Congress cite this unsubstantiated Churchill quote. Per the public broadcaster, Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, used the line so regularly that “his staff decided to put it on a plaque or some other memento.”
“But when they went to research the origins of the line, they came up empty, despite blood, toil, tears and sweat,” NPR said.
Richard Langworth, editor of a
“I wish I could substantiate that he said it. But so far, I cannot,” says Richard Langworth, editor of the journal Finest Hour, published by WinstonChurchill.org.
Langworth has combed through millions of words written by and about Churchill and found no evidence that the former prime minister ever said that about America.
This phenomenon of attributing snappy quotes to Churchill and other notable figures of history is so common it has a name, “Churchillian Drift.” Nigel Rees, former host of the BBC’s now-defunct “Quote… Unquote” radio quiz show, first coined the term to describe “the process whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous.”
Where did the quote actually come from, then?
As fact-checking blog Quote Investigator reported in 2012, the earliest version of this saying appears to come from a comment made by Israeli politician and diplomat Abba Eban, per a 1967 New York Times article — though he did not mention “Americans”:
Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”
Eban also repeated this sentiment in a United Nations speech.
The first time this quote was used to reference Americans appears to be in a U.S. congressional hearing in 1970, when Bernard F. Hillenbrand — the first executive director of the National Association of Counties, a nonprofit that represents county governments across the U.S. — attributed the quote to an anonymous “Irishman” (see PDF Page 43):
And indeed, we often know how to do things by the philosophy that was expounded by another Irishman I know. He said that you can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility.
Quote Investigator reported that by 1980, people were crediting Churchill with the quote, according to the pages of an academic journal and a Harvard Business School bulletin that are not available online.
In 1985, U.S. Department of Agriculture then-Secretary John Block also attributed a variant of this quote to Churchill during a Senate hearing (see PDF Page 69):
Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.”
Churchill died in 1965, meaning historical records indicate the quote was only attributed to him after his death.
