And, not surprisingly, with the success of the saying came a legion of spin-offs penned by authors whose names have been lost to history:
Never underestimate the power of love.
Never underestimate the power of forgiveness.
Never underestimate the power of a single vote.
Never underestimate the power of simple courtesy.
Never underestimate the value of a firm handshake.
Never underestimate the cunning of your opponent.
Never underestimate the power of a kind word or deed.
Never underestimate the importance of a first impression.
While the foregoing observations have a slightly clichéd quality, there are many others that are deeply inspirational, especially when we understand the context in which they were made or the background of the person offering the thought.
Never underestimate the power of dreams
and the influence of the human spirit.
Wilma Rudolph said this shortly after the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. The first American to win three track-and-field gold medals, she added: “We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” During the 1960 games, Rudolph’s story captured the attention of the world. Born twenty years earlier into a poor Tennessee family, she was the twentieth of twenty-two children. A sickly child whose early life was plagued by scarlet fever, pneumonia, and polio, she wore leg braces until she was nine. She once recalled, “My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” Inspired by her mother’s words, young Wilma shed her braces and by age twelve was running faster than all the boys her age. She went on to become a star high school athlete and, after joining the track team at Tennessee State University, a world-class sprinter.
In addition to the danger of underestimating things, warnings about the exact opposite problem have been attributed to two famous Americans:
Never overestimate the taste of the American public.P. T. BARNUM
Never overestimate the intelligence of the American people.H. L. MENCKEN
While these sayings have never been found in the writings or remarks of Barnum and Mencken, they continue to be repeated—in part because they capture the essence of the two cultural icons, but also because the never overestimate phrase so succinctly paves the way for a memorable conclusion.
Still other people have managed, often in quite memorable ways, to combine the problems of underestimating and overestimating in the same thought:
Never underestimate your power to change yourself.
Never overestimate your power to change others.H. JACKSON BROWN JR. in Life’s Little Instruction Book (1991)
In preparing your speeches,
you will do well to adapt the news reporters’ code:
“Never overestimate the information of your audience;
never underestimate the intelligence of your audience.”STEPHEN LUCAS, in The Art of Public Speaking (1986)
Never underestimate your own intelligence,
and never overestimate the intelligence of others.DAVID J. SCHWARTZ, in The Magic of Thinking Big (1987)
In the remainder of the chapter, you’ll find a wide variety of additional never underestimate and never overestimate quotations. As you read on, don’t be surprised if you get the itch to create a few of your own original observations. It’s a kind of fill-in-the-blanks phenomenon that you can easily observe for yourself. The next time you go to a party, challenge your fellow partiers to come up with witty or creative endings to a sentence that begins with the words Never underestimate. When the contributions on that topic die down, do the same thing with Never overestimate. Be prepared for some howls of laughter along with a few groans here and there, and don’t be surprised if a few contributions veer off in a raunchy direction. But it should all be great fun, and you can experience the enjoyment of knowing that the fun you’re having can be traced to Leo Lionni’s accidental discovery of a slip of paper in a wastepaper basket a little more than seventy years ago.
Never underestimate the cleaning power
of a 94-year-old chick with a French name.ADVERTISING SLOGAN, Bon Ami scouring powder, 1980
Since 1886, the red-and-yellow cans of Bon Ami scouring powder have appeared with an image of a newly hatched chick (it is still the product’s trademark image). In 1901, the slogan “Hasn’t scratched yet” was added to the mix, and over the years many attempts were made to make sure that American consumers knew bon ami was French for “good friend.” In an effort to revive sagging sales in 1980, the company came out with this slogan, an obvious spin-off of the famous Ladies’ Home Journal slogan.
Never underestimate the incentive generated
by the prospect of seeing one’s name in print.STEPHEN ANDREW
Never underestimate people’s capacity for screw-ups,
stupidity, misunderstandings, unproductive grudges, ignorance,
and other great traits which set us apart from the animals.GAIA & ELY ASHER, in Management for Cannibals (2003)
Never underestimate the powers of a poem;
never overestimate the powers of a reader.WALLACE BACON
Never underestimate an opponent’s daring
or overestimate his stupidity.THOMAS A. BAILEY, in The Art of Diplomacy (1968)
Bailey was referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but his assessment has been true throughout history: a country that minimizes the threat posed by a mortal enemy is in danger. In his book, Bailey said that a favorite theme of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was that democracies were not as weak as they were commonly perceived, nor dictatorships as powerful. Dulles expressed the latter view this way: “Never overestimate the strength of a dictatorship.”
My dad thinks I paid for all this with catering jobs.
Never underestimate the power of denial.WES BENTLEY, to Kevin Spacey, in the 1999 film
American Beauty (screenplay by Alan Ball)
In the film, Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged man in the midst of a major identity crisis. Bentley plays Lester’s next-door neighbor Ricky Fitts, a teenage loner who works part-time at a catering job as a “cover” for his real source of income—selling marijuana. When Lester enters Ricky’s bedroom for his first pot purchase, he is impressed by the expensive audio and video system in the room. Ricky responds to Lester with the foregoing “denial” neverism.