A.E. Clark's 2016 essay attributes the hammer-and-nail proverb to Maslow, but its exact wording matches a 1982 Weizenbaum misquote, not Maslow's own 1966 text

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A.E. Clark's 2016 Law & Liberty essay "Illegitimate Birth of the One-Child Policy" — the same essay the vault holds for crediting Song Jian and omitting Liang Zhongtang — closes on an unhedged aphorism presented as settled fact: "Abraham Maslow said that to the man who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."

The attribution is loose in a specific, traceable way. Abraham Maslow's own 1966 wording, in The Psychology of Science, runs differently: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Clark's sentence is not a paraphrase of that. It is a near-verbatim match to a secondhand rendering: Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA's creator, quoted in the 1982 New York Times, said "Abraham Maslow once said that to him who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." Both Weizenbaum and Clark move the frame to "the man/him who has only a hammer" and the object to "the whole world looks like a nail" — phrasing that is in the popular misquote tradition, not in Maslow's book. The idiom's actual named origin is earlier still and belongs to someone else entirely: Abraham Kaplan's "law of the instrument".

The finding is one instance of a pattern the vault already tracks under Stigler's Law of eponymy and in adjacent quote-conflation notes (claim-two-distinct-simon-intuition-quotes-1986-mckinsey-and-1992-psych-science-conflated, claim-cameron-2005-not-garfield-authored-tenure-and-promotion-sentence): a confidently-delivered attribution to a famous name that, checked, resolves to a chain of secondhand transmission. The resemblance between Clark's and Weizenbaum's wordings establishes shared descent from the same misquote tradition, not a proven direct copy — Clark's essay carries no footnote for the line.