Did Albert Einstein once say that “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”?

Almost certainly not. I found that quote in the fourth paragraph of an article by Timothy Sykes in Entrepreneur on December 2, 2019 titled Why you need to learn to adapt. More recently it turned up on July 9, 2020 in a LinkedIn post by Jessica R. at The Official Toastmasters International Members Group. She showed a cropped version of this one with a grainy portrait of Albert from bmabh.com.

I tried to find both when and where Einstein had said it, but my searches came up empty. It does not appear either in the comprehensive 609-page 2011 book edited by Alice Calaprice titled The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, or Fred R. Shapiro’s 2006 The Yale Book of Quotations. A search in the EBSCOhost databases from my friendly local public library only found a half dozen articles containing it, the oldest of which was a newspaper from 2012. A search in Google Books found only 21st century references to it. One book from 2014 by Anthony Trewavas is titled Plant Behaviour and Intellgence. In Chapter 19 he claimed it comes from 1934, but did not say where. A regular Google search found the earliest it shows up is on February 15, 1998 in a web page at Webscence – Citations, in both French and English.

Einstein died back in 1955. If he had said it, then you would expect to find it quoted sometime during his life rather than in 1998. I think far more likely it was said later by someone else, and as shown above, am attributing it to the mythically awful baseball player Joe Shlabotnik. On May 12, 2020 I had blogged about Did Mark Twain really say there were just nervous speakers or liars? That answer also was no.

A 1947 portrait of Einstein and a 1924 portrait of a baseball player both came from the Library of Congress.