--- title: "The ‘insanity’ line credited to Einstein first appears in 1981 recovery-group texts, not his papers" url: https://badiyaa.com/einstein-insanity-quote-origin-1981/ published: 2026-10-16T05:01:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-16T05:01:00+01:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # The ‘insanity’ line credited to Einstein first appears in 1981 recovery-group texts, not his papers A Knoxville, Tennessee, report on an Al-Anon meeting in October 1981 holds the earliest known wording; the head of Caltech's Einstein Papers Project calls the line "Not his." The oldest known printing of the “definition of insanity” line comes from a Knoxville, Tennessee, newspaper on October 11, 1981, in a report on an Al-Anon meeting. Albert Einstein had been dead for 26 years. A woman at the meeting, pushing back on the idea that she had ever needed to be “restored to sanity,” was answered by another member: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is the wording now printed on office posters under Einstein’s name. The people who edit his papers say he never wrote it. ## What the Einstein editors say The [Einstein Papers Project at Caltech](https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/techer/stories/inside-the-einstein-papers-project-with-diana-kormos-buchwald/) employs about 20 people who read his letters, diaries and manuscripts in order. Its director and general editor, historian Diana Kormos-Buchwald, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History, has run it for 25 years. In a recorded Caltech alumni conversation, she went through famous lines one by one. “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” was marked real. The insanity definition got two words: “Not his.” Asked why such lines stick to him, she answered: “There is this underground quotations culture that proliferates.” Her team’s published edition, *The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein*, began appearing from Princeton University Press in 1987. The same press’s reference book *The Ultimate Quotable Einstein*, edited by Alice Calaprice in 2010, places the line in its section of sayings misattributed to him. ## Where it really comes from The evidence points to the recovery movement. A month after the Knoxville report, in November 1981, Narcotics Anonymous printed an approval draft of its book, known in the fellowship as the Basic Text. Chapter Four, “How It Works,” discusses Step Two, the step about coming to believe a higher power could restore sanity. Page 11 includes a slightly different sentence: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” According to the Narcotics Anonymous entry in the open compendium Wikiquote, that sentence was not in the 1980 “grey book” draft circulated to members for editing, so it entered the text between 1980 and late 1981. The phrase may already have been spoken in meeting rooms before then. A Hazelden pamphlet on Step Two, first issued in 1980, quotes someone recalling, “When I came into the program, I heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The only text examined, though, is a 1992 revised edition, so the 1980 wording is unconfirmed. Anonymity is the custom in twelve-step groups, which helps explain why no individual author has ever been identified. ## Fiction, then Einstein In 1983 the novelist Rita Mae Brown gave a version to a character in *Sudden Death*, her novel set on the women’s professional tennis circuit. A sportswriter named Jane Fulton is remembered for defining insanity as repetition while expecting a new outcome; the line sits on page 68 of the Bantam edition. Brown is sometimes named as the source, but her book came two years after the Tennessee and Narcotics Anonymous texts. The Einstein label was attached by 1990. On November 19 that year, Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Ronnie Earle was quoted in an Austin newspaper saying, “Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” In 1991 an Indiana judge, quoted in Seattle, called it “Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.” ## The dates side by side - **April 18, 1955:** Einstein dies in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 76. - **October 11, 1981:** the Knoxville Al-Anon report. - **November 1981:** the Narcotics Anonymous approval draft, page 11. - **1983:** Rita Mae Brown’s *Sudden Death*. - **November 19, 1990:** the earliest Einstein credit found, in Texas. Put the first and last dates together and the attribution appears 35 years after his death (1990 minus 1955), and nine years after the first recovery-group printing (1990 minus 1981). The idea itself is older than any of these texts. In 1895 George Bernard Shaw mocked Max Nordau’s book *Degeneration*, which treated repetition in art as a sign of mental disorder, as “two hundred and sixty thousand mortal words, saying the same thing over and over again.” And in 1955, the year Einstein died, the psychologist George A. Kelly defined a disorder as a personal construction “used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation.” Anyone checking an Einstein quote can start where his editors do: the Collected Papers, and the misattributed section of *The Ultimate Quotable Einstein*, where this sentence sits on page 474. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Albert Einstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein) *Image: Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*