Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock
Not Will Rogers — first credited to Walter TrumbullWalter S. Trumbull1880–1961 · American syndicated sports columnist
?Attribution status: Documented in print in 1925 under another name; the Rogers credit appears only decades after his death.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
Will Rogers never got the credit in his lifetime. The earliest documented version — “Diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you have a chance to pick up a rock” — ran in The Honolulu Advertiser on 14 September 1925 over the name Walter Trumbull, and Trumbull printed his own version in a syndicated column in 1931. Quote Investigator ↗ calls him the leading candidate for coiner and finds “no substantive evidence” that Rogers crafted the line; the Rogers credit surfaces only in the 1980s.
“Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock” is not Will Rogers. The earliest documented version — "Diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying 'Nice doggie' until you have a chance to pick up a rock" — appeared in The Honolulu Advertiser, 14 September 1925, credited to sportswriter Walter Trumbull. Will Rogers was not credited until the 1980s. Source: Quote Investigator, 18 December 2017.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Will Rogers. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? 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.
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In context
Evoking the world of Walter S. Trumbull — American sportswriter · sports editor, The New York Sun. Theme: "Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock". 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.
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Provenance
The 1925 printing
Earliest documented in
The Honolulu Advertiser, “The Week in Epigram”
Date
14 September 1925 · quote page 10, column 3
Credited to
Walter Trumbull — syndicated sports columnist, not a diplomat or humorist
Modern wording
“the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ till you can find a rock” — Bennett Cerf’s column, 29 July 1958, crediting Wynn Catlin
Diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying “Nice doggie” until you have a chance to pick up a rock—Walter Trumbull.
Earliest known form, 1925
As transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from the newspaper’s weekly column of collected epigrams. Note how much longer and more hedged it is than the version circulating today.
September 1925 — the earliest strong match: The Honolulu Advertiser prints the epigram over the name Walter Trumbull, per Quote Investigator ↗.
January 1931 — Trumbull runs a tightened version in his own North American Newspaper Alliance column: “Diplomacy consists in saying ‘nice doggie,’ until you can pick up a rock,” as documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
July 1958 — Bennett Cerf’s syndicated column gives the modern snappy wording to Wynn Catlin, the form quotation sites still recycle — see Quote Investigator ↗.
1986 — Robert Byrne’s quotation collection assigns it to Will Rogers; Wikiquote ↗ now lists the line under Misattributed on his page.
The 1925 newspaper epigram itself is a pre-1931 US publication and would be in the public domain, but the wording circulating today is a later variant whose own first appearance has not been pinned — its closest documented antecedent is a 1958 syndicated column. Because the popular sentence cannot be tied to a specific dated work, quotle.info asserts no rights status for it.
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
Everyone who has been handed this line
This is a textbook floating epigram: a joke good enough that every generation reassigns it to whoever was funniest at the time. At least six names have carried it, and the most famous one came last.
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The popular creditWill Rogers Misattributed
Rogers died in 1935, but Quote Investigator ↗ finds the attribution to him appearing only “by the 1980s which was very late,” with Robert Byrne’s 1986 collection The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said giving him the modern wording. QI’s verdict: “there is no substantive evidence that he crafted it.” Wikiquote ↗ files both variants under Misattributed.
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The runner-upWynn Catlin Popularizer, not coiner
Bennett Cerf’s syndicated column of 29 July 1958 reported that “Wynn Catlin defines diplomacy as the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ till you can find a rock” — the source of the modern snappy wording, but more than thirty years after the 1925 printing, per Quote Investigator ↗. Some reference sites, including WIST ↗, still credit Catlin outright.
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Mid-century creditsFranklin Rodman and Frances Rodman Later credit
An Illinois paper credited Franklin Rodman in 1953 and a 1954 Reader’s Digest credited Frances Rodman, both long after the saying was circulating, per Quote Investigator ↗.
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The other magnet nameWinston Churchill No basis
Wikiquote ↗ notes a variant credited to Churchill by Dick Applegate in a speech reprinted in The Carpenter in 1955 — the same reassignment reflex that later landed the line on Rogers.
✕
A stray creditRobert Phelps Later credit
A 1967 newspaper “Cryptoquote” puzzle attributed the saying to Robert Phelps, one more name added after the joke was already common property, per Quote Investigator ↗.
✓The earliest strong match found by Quote Investigator ↗ is The Honolulu Advertiser of 14 September 1925, crediting Walter Trumbull — who reused the line in his own syndicated column in 1931. He is the leading candidate for coiner; Will Rogers is simply the most famous name it later stuck to.
Context
Why this one stuck to Will Rogers
Will Rogers is one of the internet’s great quote magnets: a homespun American humorist who really did write thousands of syndicated newspaper columns, which makes almost any folksy political wisecrack look like it might be his. This one fits the costume perfectly — and that is exactly the problem. The joke was already circulating in newspapers in 1925, while Rogers was at the height of his fame, and nobody thought to put his name on it for another sixty-odd years.
Quote Investigator traces a long chain of borrowed credit: an unattributed reprint in 1930, Walter Trumbull running it again in his own 1931 column, a Franklin Rodman credit in 1953, a Frances Rodman credit in a 1954 Reader’s Digest, Bennett Cerf handing it to Wynn Catlin in 1958, a Robert Phelps credit in a 1967 newspaper puzzle, and finally Robert Byrne’s 1986 quotation book pinning it on Rogers. Each new name arrived after the joke was already famous — the classic signature of a floating epigram rather than an authored line.
Rogers’s name arrived last, long after the joke was already in print.
How the wording drifted
The 1925 form is wordier and more cautious: diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying “Nice doggie” until you have a chance to pick up a rock. Trumbull’s own 1931 column tightened it to “Diplomacy consists in saying ‘nice doggie,’ until you can pick up a rock.”
The snappier modern shape — the art of saying “Nice doggie” till you can find a rock — is the one Bennett Cerf printed in 1958 while crediting Wynn Catlin. That is the version, with “until” swapped in for “till,” that quotation sites now attach to Will Rogers.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1880–1961 · American sportswriter · sports editor, The New York Sun
Walter Slater Trumbull was an American sportswriter who worked as sports editor of The New York Sun and wrote a nationally syndicated column. Quote Investigator describes the man credited with the 1925 epigram as a sports writer for the North American Newspaper Alliance who was known well enough to substitute for Grantland Rice — a description that matches the syndicated columnist of that name. He is the leading candidate for coiner rather than a proven author: the 1925 newspaper simply printed the line with his name attached, and he reused it in his own column in 1931.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
“The Week in Epigram,” The Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu, HI), September 14, 1925, quote page 10, column 3, crediting Walter Trumbull. Traced in “Quote Origin: Diplomacy Frequently Consists in Soothingly Saying ‘Nice Doggie’ Until You Have a Chance to Pick Up a Rock,” Quote Investigator, December 18, 2017.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggie until you can find a rock’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/diplomacy-is-the-art-of-saying-nice-doggie-until-you-can/