Barry Popik’s citation chronology ↗ finds the line in print on 6 April 1923, in the syndicated humorist Robert Quillen’s column “Editorial Epigrams” in The Evening Repository of Canton, Ohio: “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” Frost’s name is not attached until Walter Winchell’s “On Broadway” column of 11 November 1940 — seventeen years later, printed as “R. Frost’s” with no source — and Popik states there is no evidence Frost said it before Quillen. Wikiquote’s Frost page ↗ carries no entry for it in any section.
“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day” printed by the syndicated humorist Robert Quillen (1887–1948) in his column "Editorial Epigrams," The Evening Repository (Canton, OH), 6 April 1923. Credited to Robert Frost only from a Walter Winchell column of 1940, on no evidence. Via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Robert Frost. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Robert Quillen — American journalist, humorist & small-town newspaper editor. Theme: "By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
What the paper trail actually shows
Earliest printing
Robert Quillen, “Editorial Epigrams,” 6 Apr 1923
First credit to Frost
Walter Winchell, “On Broadway,” 11 Nov 1940
Credited to
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Aggregator source line
“Rand Lindsly’s Quotations” — a compilation, not a Frost work
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
Quillen, 1923
That is the 1923 wording exactly as Quillen printed it — “get to be boss,” not “get to be a boss.” There is no fuller passage to quote, because “Editorial Epigrams” was a column of standalone one-liners: the epigram is the whole item, which is part of why it travelled so easily without its author.
Barry Popik’s entry on this saying ↗ gives a dated chronology drawn from primary newspaper pages. The earliest is Robert Quillen, “Editorial Epigrams,” The Evening Repository (Canton, Ohio), 6 April 1923, p. 4, col. 3. A loosened version follows in “Wheezes and What Not,” Bellingham Herald, 25 February 1928, p. 1.
The first appearance of Frost’s name in that chronology is Walter Winchell’s “On Broadway,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 11 November 1940, p. 7, col. 4: “R. Frost’s: By working faithfully eight hours a day you can get eventually to be a boss, and work 12 hours a day.” That is seventeen years after Quillen printed it, and twenty-two years before Frost died in January 1963 ↗. Popik states plainly that there is no evidence Frost said it before Quillen.
Wikiquote’s Robert Frost page ↗ has no entry for this line in any section — while pinning a comparable one-liner, the jury quip, to a hard citation in Lawrance Thompson’s Fire and Ice (1961).
A site search of Quote Investigator ↗ returns no article on this saying; QI has not published on it. The tracing here is Popik’s, from the newspaper record.
A full-text sweep of scanned books via Open Library ↗ returns hundreds of matches; the first page of results is entirely quotation and humour compilations, every one crediting Frost without naming a work. The book corpus preserves the misattribution; the newspaper corpus preserves the origin.
The earliest located text is a United States newspaper item published in 1923, and everything first published in the United States before 1929 is in the public domain there, so the epigram as Quillen printed it is free to reuse. Robert Quillen died in 1948, so life-plus-70 terms elsewhere expired at the end of 2018 as well. What is not covered is the credit: reusing the line under Robert Frost’s name repeats an attribution the newspaper record does not support.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Where the credit comes from
This is the ordinary shape of a borrowed epigram: a line printed under one name in 1923, hung on a more famous name in 1940, and repeated until the second name looked settled.
✕
The attributionRobert Frost unsourced
No poem, essay, lecture, letter or recorded interview of Frost’s has been shown to contain the line, and it reaches him seventeen years late: the first credit in Barry Popik’s chronology ↗ is Walter Winchell’s “On Broadway” of 11 November 1940, printed as “R. Frost’s” with no source. Wikiquote’s Robert Frost page ↗ — which arranges his quotations by work and cites his other aphorisms to named books and newspapers — carries no entry for it in any section.
✕
The ‘source’Rand Lindsly’s Quotations aggregator
The Quotations Page ↗ does print a source line for its entry, but it points to a quotation file rather than to anything Frost wrote or said. A compilation citing a compilation is not provenance.
~
The wordingTwo competing versions drift
Quillen’s 1923 text reads “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss…” Each circulating version keeps half of that and loses the other half: The Quotations Page ↗ keeps the word order but smooths it to “a boss”, while Goodreads ↗ keeps “boss” but transposes the opening to “By faithfully working”. Neither matches the original, and the version everyone quotes as Frost’s matches it least.
✓The honest answer is that the line is Robert Quillen’s, seventeen years before anyone thought of Frost — Barry Popik’s chronology ↗ runs from “Editorial Epigrams” on 6 April 1923 to Winchell’s “R. Frost’s” on 11 November 1940, and finds no evidence Frost said it before Quillen.
Context
Why this one sticks to Frost
The line is a good joke about promotion, and it lands in the register people expect from Frost — dry, New England, mildly disillusioned. He really did produce quips of that shape, and the documented ones can be pinned down: Wikiquote ↗ traces “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer” to Lawrance Thompson’s Fire and Ice (1961). That is what a real Frost aphorism looks like on paper: a book, a year, a page.
This one has a book, a year and a page too — they just belong to somebody else. Robert Quillen was a professional paragrapher, and a paragrapher’s whole craft is the detachable sentence: something short enough to be lifted into a filler column three states away, which is exactly what happened. By the time Walter Winchell reached for it in 1940 it had been loose in the newspapers for seventeen years, and Winchell hung it on the most quotable poet alive. Compilers copy each other, and a name attached once tends to stay attached forever.
It does come with a book, a year and a page. They belong to a South Carolina paragrapher, not to Robert Frost.
What we searched, and what we could not
A full-text search of scanned books via Open Library ↗ returns hundreds of matches for the line. The titles on the first page of results are all quotation and humour compilations — office-joke books, business-quote handbooks, gift-book collections — and every one of them credits Robert Frost without naming a work.
That is a book-corpus result, and on its own it is misleading: books preserve the misattribution because compilers copy compilers. The origin is in the newspaper record, which is where Barry Popik works — his dated citations reach back to Quillen in 1923 and forward through a 1928 Bellingham Herald filler and a 1947 Ed Kuekes cartoon in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We still say “the earliest printing located” rather than “the first ever printed”: Quillen’s column was an epigram digest, so an older anonymous appearance could yet surface. What would not change is that the line is in print, under a named author, seventeen years before Frost’s name touches it.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1887–1948 · American journalist, humorist & small-town newspaper editor
Robert Quillen edited the Fountain Inn Tribune, a weekly he founded in 1911 in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, and from that small office became one of the most widely syndicated humorists in America: by 1932 his editorials, paragraphs, cartoons and one-liners were running in four hundred newspapers across the United States, Canada, England and the Far East, and he was reckoned the best “paragrapher” of his day — a specialist in the single printed sentence built to be reprinted. That is also the machinery by which a line escapes its author: the epigram travels, the byline does not. This is one of the ones that got away.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source & chronology
Robert Quillen, “Editorial Epigrams,” The Evening Repository (Canton, OH), April 6, 1923, 4, col. 3. Attribution history and later citations: Barry Popik, “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually be the boss and work twelve hours,” barrypopik.com — including Walter Winchell, “On Broadway,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 11, 1940, 7, col. 4, the first credit to “R. Frost.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/by-working-faithfully-eight-hours-a-day-you-may-eventually/