Think Incompetence before Malice
Infinite sources (too obvious perhaps. I bet there is a patent on this). Wikipedia sez . The quotation first came from Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania , according to his friend Joseph Bigler, as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law published in 1980 titled Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong . [1] The name was inspired by Occam's razor . [2] A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein 's 1941 short story " Logic of Empire " ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File , [3] with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute t...