The phrase “Life is hard; it’s harder when you’re stupid” (also variously rendered as “Life is hard; it’s even harder when you’re stupid” or “Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid”) 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 that’s sufficient for most people. But John Wayne didn’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 — the IMDb even listed this saying as one of the film’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 book’s title character is an aging, small-time criminal and informant who works as a gun runner in Boston’s Irish-American underworld; but it is another character, the young gun runner Jackie Brown, who ends up saying, “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” That line comes through almost intact in the film version, rendered by actor Steven Keats (playing Jackie Brown) as “This life’s hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid”:
A variation on this comes from a talk radio guy here in Phoenix. Said it came from his Mom, so it might have been around for awhile, but I like it:
If your going to be dumb, you better be tough.
Up until 20 minutes ago I lived roughly 38 years believing J.W. said this. I just checked the script... not in there. I’ll be dipped...