Not documented as Goldwyn’s — and this wording is from 1946Unknown — no speaker is documentedThe phrase is in print from February 1934 with no name attached
Samuel Goldwyn denied saying it. Profiled in LIFE in February 1959 he insisted he had said “Gentlemen, I’m withdrawing from the association” and that “by the time I got back to the studio, it was all over town I’d said, ‘Include me out.’” Quote Investigator ↗’s earliest located instance has no Goldwyn in it at all: a February 1934 newspaper serialization of the 1933 film Let’s Fall In Love, in which a producer character says “Include me out of it.” Alva Johnston pinned the line to Goldwyn in 1937 as “Gentlemen, include me out”; the longer wording asked about here first shows up in Louis Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Laughter in 1946.
“Gentlemen, You May Include Me Out” Not documented as Samuel Goldwyn's: he denied it to LIFE in 1959. The phrase is in print from 19 February 1934 with no name attached; this wording from Louis Untermeyer, A Treasury of Laughter (1946), p. 253. Traced by Quotle.info
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In context
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Minimalist
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Provenance
Where this exact wording comes from
Earliest documented phrase
19 February 1934 · Tyrone Daily Herald, serialization of Let’s Fall In Love, p. 5 — “Include me out of it”, spoken by a producer character
This exact wording
A Treasury of Laughter
That book
Selected and edited by Louis Untermeyer · Simon and Schuster, New York, 1946 · p. 253
Goldwyn’s own account
“It’s ridiculous. It’s a lie.” — LIFE, 16 February 1959, p. 116
Verdict
Disputed — no documented speaker; QI leaves it open
It took place at a long conference of directors, producers, and bigwigs. They were all trying to induce Goldwyn to join them in a project which he disliked. Finally he turned to them and said, “Gentlemen, the best I can give you is a definite maybe.” Then, a few minutes later, he said, “I’ve reconsidered my decision. Gentlemen, you may include me out.”
Louis Untermeyer, A Treasury of Laughter, 1946, p. 253
This is the anecdote as Quote Investigator ↗ reproduces it from Untermeyer’s collection — the earliest source QI gives for the exact wording on this page, with the familiar sentence in bold. Note what the anecdote is: a humour anthology retelling a Hollywood story, two decades after the phrase first appeared in print without a name on it.
Quote Investigator ↗ gives the earliest instance as a newspaper serialization of the 1933 Columbia film Let’s Fall In Love, published 19 February 1934 in the Tyrone Daily Herald, page 5, column 2. The speaker is Max, a film producer in the story, and the line is “Include me out of it.” QI notes Herbert Fields wrote the story and screenplay but that it is not clear who wrote the serialization.
Through the mid-1930s the phrase keeps appearing with nobody’s name on it: an unidentified man at a Chicago business meeting in June Provines’s Chicago Tribune column of 27 March 1935, a “prominent film executive” in Sheilah Graham’s column in 1936, “our pet producer” in 1937 — all dated and cited by QI ↗.
Goldwyn enters in 1937, with Alva Johnston’s The Great Goldwyn — serialized in the Saturday Evening Post that May, per QI ↗. We read the book itself, which the Internet Archive serves in full view ↗: at page 16 Johnston writes that an ordinary man quitting the Hays organization might have said “Gentlemen, I prefer to stand aloof”, and that “Sam said, ‘Gentlemen, include me out.’” Note the form — Johnston has no “you may” in it. The longer wording on this page QI dates to Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Laughter, page 253, which the Internet Archive’s catalogue record ↗ dates to 1946.
Goldwyn denied it on the record. QI quotes ↗ the LIFE profile of 16 February 1959: “None of them are true. They’re all made up by a bunch of comedians and pinned on me … It’s ridiculous. It’s a lie.” QI ends with two scenarios — Goldwyn said something like it in 1933 or earlier and it spread, or a Hollywood quipster made it up and publicists hung it on him — and does not choose between them. Neither do we.
Johnston knew the problem even as he wrote. On the same page, read in that full-view scan ↗, he warns that “today it takes an expert to pick the genuine Goldwyn lines from the spurious. More people are counterfeiting on Goldwyn than on Uncle Sam” — and then files “include me out” among what he calls the true ones. That is a judgement by the man who put the line into general circulation, not independent evidence for it.
The passage quoted here is from A Treasury of Laughter, selected and edited by Louis Untermeyer and published by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1946 — after the 1931 cutoff for the United States public domain — so it is treated as in copyright and only the short anecdote is reproduced, for identification, verification and criticism.
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
The most famous Goldwynism, and the one he denied
This is the line Goldwyn is best known for and the line he most flatly disowned. The record does not settle it either way, so neither does this page.
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Popularly credited toSamuel Goldwyn Denied by him; unresolved by QI
Goldwyn told LIFE in 1959 that he had said “Gentlemen, I’m withdrawing from the association” and that the Goldwynisms were “all made up by a bunch of comedians and pinned on me”. Quote Investigator ↗ finds no citation naming him before Alva Johnston’s 1937 biography, three years after the phrase was already in print — but allows a scenario in which he did say it in 1933 or earlier and the phrase escaped into Hollywood from there. Wikiquote ↗ files it under Misattributed, citing Boller and George, They Never Said It (1990), p. 40.
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The wording“Gentlemen, include me out” Later variant
Johnston’s 1937 version, the one that made the line famous, is the short form — we read it at page 16 of the full-view scan ↗: “Sam said, ‘Gentlemen, include me out.’” “Gentlemen, you may include me out” is longer and later: QI ↗ dates it to Untermeyer’s anthology in the 1940s, and Bennett Cerf’s Try and Stop Me (1944) gives a third form, “Gentlemen, kindly include me out.”
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Also told ofAn unnamed Chicago businessman, and “our pet producer” Early users, not the author
Before any name stuck, QI documents ↗ the phrase in a 1935 Chicago Tribune column about a meeting at the Hotel Sherman and in Sheilah Graham’s Hollywood columns of 1936 and 1937, each time with the speaker left anonymous. A line that floats like that usually has no single author to find.
✓Best evidence: the phrase is documented from 19 February 1934, in a newspaper serialization of Let’s Fall In Love, with no Goldwyn in it; this exact wording from Louis Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Laughter (1946), p. 253 — both per Quote Investigator ↗, which leaves the authorship open.
Context
Why it mattered
Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974) was a Polish-born producer and studio founder, and by the 1930s he was famous enough that a whole genre of jokes — “Goldwynisms” — could be manufactured in his voice. Being the man the gags got pinned on is its own kind of fame, and he knew it.
The LIFE denial is the best part of the story. He protested that the lines were invented and hung on him, then, as QI quotes the reporter ↗, “hid something, perhaps a smile, behind his napkin.”
He denied it to LIFE in 1959 with a straight face — and, the reporter noticed, a napkin.
Read the full story
The chronology QI assembles is the useful thing here: a 1934 film serialization, an anonymous 1935 businessman, two anonymous Hollywood columns, then a biography in 1937 that gives the line a speaker, then anthologies in 1944 and 1946 that smooth the wording, then a studio history in 1969 and a memoir in 1975 retelling it as settled fact. The confidence grows at every step while the evidence does not.
David Niven put the sceptical case in Bring On the Empty Horses (1975), listing the famous Goldwynisms and asking — in a passage QI quotes ↗ — “who can claim to have been present when these pearls of wisdom were dropped?”
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1882–1974 · Polish-born American film producer and studio founder
Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974) was a Polish-born American film producer and a pioneer of the American film industry, who produced what is described as the United States’s first major motion picture and was a founding contributor and executive of several studios. He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1947), the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (1958) and the Cecil B. DeMille Award (1973). He is named here because the line is told about him — not because the record shows he said it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The earliest documented source (Chicago)
“Let’s Fall In Love” (serialization by arrangement with Columbia Pictures). Tyrone Daily Herald, 19 February 1934, p. 5, col. 2. Earliest instance located by Quote Investigator. This wording: Untermeyer, Louis, ed. A Treasury of Laughter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946, p. 253.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Gentlemen, You May Include Me Out’?” Last verified 18 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/gentlemen-you-may-include-me-out/