“When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.”
Alternate version: If you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
Of Paradise and Power, p. 26
According to Kagan, this is a variation of the proverb "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." (p. 25 of the same book)
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Robert Kagan 7
American political scientist 1958Related quotes
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
“And I don't want to mean anything to you,
I don't want to tempt you to be true.”
Echo
Lyrics, Echo (1999)
Head Like a Hole, from Pretty Hate Machine (1990).
Song lyrics
The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966), Ch. 2, p. 15; although some similar statements to describe fundamental errors in human perception have been attributed to others, his expression, or slight paraphrases of it, is one of the earliest yet found to be documented in published writings, and remains among the most popular.
1940s-1960s