claim: John Wayne (or one of the characters he portrayed) said, "Life is hard; it's even harder when you're stupid."
origin: The phrase â€œLife is hard; itâ€™s harder when youâ€™re stupidâ€ (also variously rendered as â€œLife is hard; itâ€™s even harder when youâ€™re stupidâ€ or â€œLife is tough, but itâ€™s tougher when youâ€™re stupidâ€) has long been a favorite of memists, nearly all of whom attribute the saying to iconic Western film actor John Wayne. It sounds like something the blunt-speaking Duke would have said, and thatâ€™s sufficient for most people. But John Wayne didnâ€™t actually say this, either as a line of character dialogue in a film or speaking as himself. This line has been claimed of various characters played by Wayne in a number of movies, most commonly the 1949 release Sands of Iwo Jima, in which Wayne portrayed the battle-hardened Marine sergeant John M. Stryker â€” the IMDb even listed this saying as one of the filmâ€™s memorable quotes. But no character in Sands of Iwo Jima, Sgt. Stryker or otherwise, speaks such a line. And no one has yet turned up a film clip or script documenting the phrase as something spoken by a Wayne character in any other movie. So where did the phrase come from? Is it yet another great saying thought up by that witty sage, Anonymous? The earliest known cinematic use of this thought (whatever its precise expression) appears in the 1973 crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which was in turn based on the 1970 novel of the same name by George V. Higgins. The bookâ€™s title character is an aging, small-time criminal and informant who works as a gun runner in Bostonâ€™s Irish-American underworld; but it is another character, the young gun runner Jackie Brown, who ends up saying, â€œThis lifeâ€™s hard, but itâ€™s harder if youâ€™re stupid.â€ That line comes through almost intact in the film version, rendered by actor Steven Keats (playing Jackie Brown) as â€œThis lifeâ€™s hard, man, but itâ€™s harder if youâ€™re stupidâ€: It has also been claimed that John Wayne said this line during a 1966 guest appearance on The Dean Martin Show, in the context of his passing along wisdom to the younger generation. Wayne did participate in a segment for that show in which he discussed his thoughts about what he wanted for his then-infant daughter Marisa, but a clip of that segment (no longer available online) does not record him speaking the line in question.