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"Aut inveniam viam aut faciam" (or "Aut viam inveniam aut faciam") is Latin for "I shall either find a way or make one." The first word "aut" may be omitted, corresponding to omitting the English word "either" from the translation.
The phrase has been attributed to Hannibal; when his generals told him it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant, this was supposedly his response. However, Hannibal would have spoken in Punic, not Latin. The first part of the sentence, "inveniam viam", "I shall find a way," also appears in other contexts in the tragedies of Seneca, spoken by Hercules and by Oedipus, and in Seneca's Hercules Furens (Act II, Scene 1, line 276) the whole sentence appears, in third person: "inveniet viam, aut faciet."
It has also been frequently used as a motto; for instance, it was used in this way by Francis Bacon, and is now used in this way by the S.T.E.M. Academy at University High School in Orange City, Florida, Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville, MD and Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, by online science education provider Testbankprep.com, Chigwell School in Essex, England, York House School in Hertfordshire, England, Swansea Medical School RFC in Swansea, Wales, Combat Logistics Battalion 24 in the United States Marine Corps, and by Brickfields Asia College Law Society in Kuala Lumpur. The phrase is also the motto of the 169th promotion Polytechnic in the Belgian Royal Military Academy. It was formerly the motto of the Big Sandy News, a weekly paper in Louisa, Ky. It is also the motto for the fictional University of American Samoa from the television series Better Call Saul.
This quote, changed to first person plural, is written on an iron arch over the class of 1893 memorial gate at the University Of Pennsylvania. A painting in the National Portrait Gallery, formerly attributed as Sir Philip Sidney and now thought to depict his brother Robert, is adorned with the phrase. In The Dunciad, Alexander Pope writes of John Henley that he "turned his rhetoric to buffoonry" by handing out medallions engraved with this motto. The comic strip Frazz featured the saying on April 23, 2015.