evidence: What’s really interesting about all this misattribution is that nobody actually knows where the phrase came from. One source traces it back to the mystery writer Rita Mae Brown. The phrase "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results" can be found in her 1983 book Sudden Death. Still, it appears that she was merely paraphrasing an expression that had been written elsewhere. Many point to a Narcotics Anonymous text, released in 1981, as the original source for this saying. Others point out that it seems to have been in oral use in the addiction-recovery community before that, as it was cited in a pamphlet from an addiction-recovery program in 1980, and in an Alcoholics Anonymous text published during the same year. However, the original version of this Alcoholics Anonymous text does not appear to be online; Google Books, for example, only has the 1992 version.