"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment"
About this Quote
Originality, Billings suggests, is less a bolt of divine lightning than a practiced form of larceny. Coming from a 19th-century American comedian who built a career on folksy misspellings and plainspoken barbs, the line works as a wink at a culture that worships “genius” while quietly running on imitation. It’s not a surrender to cynicism so much as a demystification: the honest writer isn’t the one who pretends to invent language from scratch, but the one who admits the toolbox is shared.
The phrase “steal with good judgment” is the tell. Billings turns a moral charge into a craft principle, swapping the courtroom for the workshop. “Steal” keeps the sting; “good judgment” supplies the alibi. The joke lands because it names a taboo most writers know: every style is stitched from influences, and every “new” idea has fingerprints. By calling it stealing, he punctures the self-serious posture of literary purity. By insisting on judgment, he draws a line between plagiarism (lazy copying) and the more interesting act of transformation: taking what works, reframing it, and making it do different cultural labor.
Context matters here. Billings was part of a booming print era of lectures, newspapers, and mass-circulation humor, where bits traveled fast and authorship blurred. In that marketplace, “originality” was as much branding as aesthetics. His intent is both practical and comic: stop fetishizing novelty, start curating your influences, and if you’re going to borrow, at least borrow like a professional.
The phrase “steal with good judgment” is the tell. Billings turns a moral charge into a craft principle, swapping the courtroom for the workshop. “Steal” keeps the sting; “good judgment” supplies the alibi. The joke lands because it names a taboo most writers know: every style is stitched from influences, and every “new” idea has fingerprints. By calling it stealing, he punctures the self-serious posture of literary purity. By insisting on judgment, he draws a line between plagiarism (lazy copying) and the more interesting act of transformation: taking what works, reframing it, and making it do different cultural labor.
Context matters here. Billings was part of a booming print era of lectures, newspapers, and mass-circulation humor, where bits traveled fast and authorship blurred. In that marketplace, “originality” was as much branding as aesthetics. His intent is both practical and comic: stop fetishizing novelty, start curating your influences, and if you’re going to borrow, at least borrow like a professional.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) , aphorism: "About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment." See Wikiquote entry for Josh Billings. |
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