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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.
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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