“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

—  Benjamin Franklin

Misattributed to various people, including Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. An early occurrence was used as a teaching reference at University of California, Irvine in social science lectures in the later 1960s. Also found in a 1981 text from Narcotics Anonymous.
Misattributed

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Benjamin Franklin 183
American author, printer, political theorist, politician, p… 1706–1790

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“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

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Variously attributed also to Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. The earliest known occurrence, and probable origin, is from a 1981 text from Narcotics Anonymous: "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results." Cf. Rita Mae Brown#Misattributed.
Misattributed
Variant: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

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Brown did include this quote in her book Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68, but it appears she was just paraphrasing a quote that had already been written elsewhere. The earliest known appearance of a similar quote is the "approval version" of the Narcotics Anonymous "Basic Text" released in November 1981, which included the quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results." A PDF scan of the 1981 approval version can be found here http://www.nauca.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1981-11-Basic-Text-Approval-Form-White.pdf, with the quote appearing on p. 11 (p. 25 of the PDF), at the end of the fourth paragraph (which begins "We have a disease; progressive, incurable and fatal"). More in this article https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/ on Quote Investigator website.
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