The Savage Chickens cartoon for November 18, 2025 by Doug Savage is titled The Amazing Hammer and is shown above. It illustrates a proverb Wikipedia terms the Law of the instrument. Some web sites attribute versions of it to Mark Twain:
Goodreads - “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
AZ Quotes – “If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”
Quotefancy - “To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
At Quote Investigator on May 8, 2014 Garson O’Toole discussed it in an article titled Quote Origin: If Your Only Tool Is A Hammer Then Every Problem Looks Like a Nail. He found no evidence for Mark Twain, and rather found a 1962 version by Abraham Kaplan:
“Give a boy a hammer and everything he meets has to be pounded.”
There also are a 1964 version by Abraham Maslow:
“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
and another 1966 version:
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
Update November 23, 2025
Adam Savage’s 2019 memoir Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life is what you make it discusses the converse. In Chapter 12 Hammers, Blades, and Scissors, on pages 266 and 267 he writes about his friend, Mark Buck:
“He was a man with an aversion for fools and a love of tools. If he walked by your workbench and he saw you looking too long for something in your toolbox, he’d instruct you in an almost solemn tone, like a sifu, ‘Remember, in every tool, there is a hammer.’ What he meant was that every tool can be used for a purpose for which it wasn’t intended, including the most basic of operations, like hammering. He also meant that until you learn to see what tools can do beyond their stated purpose, you can’t quite be a maker. Truer words have rarely been spoken.”
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