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Who really said it

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment

Not Will Rogers — an anonymous saying Anonymous Unattributed American saying · in print by February 1932
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No Will Rogers column, daily telegram, film line or book has ever been produced that contains this sentence, and it appears nowhere in the sourced or misattributed lists on his Wikiquote page. The saying was already circulating anonymously while Rogers was alive — the earliest match Quote Investigator located is a February 1932 Indiana newspaper item that credits no one, and the only Rogers-credited citation the same article documents is a March 2000 column reprinting a forwarded email — whose own columnist added that the line was “probably never said by Rogers.”

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment” not Will Rogers. The saying is anonymous: its earliest documented appearance is an unattributed remark in The Muncie Evening Press, 17 February 1932, worded "Good Judgment depends mostly on experience and experience usually comes from poor judgment." Attribution history: Quote Investigator, 23 February 2017. Via quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Will Rogers. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of wisdom, failure and growth. Theme: "Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment". 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 "Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment". 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

The earliest documented appearance

Publication
The Muncie Evening Press (Muncie, Indiana)
Date
17 February 1932, page 4
Credited to
No one — quoted as a floating remark at a Rotary Club meeting
Research
Quote Investigator, 23 February 2017

Good Judgment depends mostly on experience and experience usually comes from poor judgment. Earliest known — 1932

This is the wording of the earliest known appearance, not the modern popular phrasing. The familiar “and a lot of that comes from bad judgment” version is a later smoothing, documented in the Rogers-credited email column of 2000.

Quote Investigator: the full citation trail, 1932 to 2001

How the attribution drifted

  • 1932 — anonymous from the start. The earliest match located by Quote Investigator ran in The Muncie Evening Press on 17 February 1932, where a speaker named Fred Rose quoted it at a Rotary Club meeting in a way that signalled the saying was already common property.
  • 1943–1945 — still ownerless. A 1943 Baltimore Sun item repeats it in dialect with no named author; in April 1945 Reader's Digest ran the anecdote in which Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. credits “Uncle Zeke” of his Kentucky home town. Newspapers reprinted the Zeke story that December.
  • 1986–2001 — the names arrive. Robert Byrne's collection assigned it to Barry LePatner; Rita Mae Brown used it in 2001 as an old saying. Neither is an origin, and Quote Investigator's conclusion is that the saying was anonymous in its earliest instances.
  • Rogers's own record is silent. The line appears nowhere in the sourced, attributed or misattributed sections of Wikiquote's Will Rogers page, and the Will Rogers Memorial Museum — which cautions that some quotes credited to him are falsely credited — does not list it either.

No copyright status can honestly be asserted, because no author and no originating work are known. The earliest documented printing is a 1932 newspaper item that names no author, and the modern popular wording is a later, unsourced smoothing — so this is an orphan saying rather than an excerpt from an identifiable work. Quotle.info does not claim public-domain status for text it cannot tie to a specific pre-1931 source.

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

Who has been credited — and why none of it holds

This is a genuinely ownerless aphorism, and ownerless aphorisms collect names. At least four have been attached to it, none supported by a primary source.

Will Rogers unsupported

No pre-2000 citation credits him. Quote Investigator documents exactly one Rogers-credited instance — a March 2000 column in Florida Today reprinting a forwarded email of “Will Rogers' wisdom” — and the columnist himself flagged that the line was “probably never said by Rogers.” The saying is absent from his Wikiquote page entirely, and from the Will Rogers Memorial Museum's quote page.

Barry LePatner 1986

Robert Byrne's 1986 quotation collection printed the saying under LePatner's name, and reference sites followed — The Quotations Page still lists it that way, with no source. The saying predates that credit by more than fifty years.

Rita Mae Brown 2001

Brown used the expression in her 2001 novel Alma Mater and helped popularise it, but Quote Investigator notes she presented it as an old saying rather than her own coinage.

“Uncle Zeke” 1945

An April 1945 Reader's Digest anecdote has Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. attribute the line to a wise old man from his Kentucky home town. Uncle Zeke is a figure in a told story, not a documented speaker — and the saying was already in print thirteen years earlier.

The honest answer is that nobody knows who said it first. The earliest surviving appearance, per Quote Investigator, is an unattributed remark quoted at a Rotary Club meeting and printed in The Muncie Evening Press on 17 February 1932.

Context

Why this one sticks to Will Rogers

The line has a shape Rogers made famous — homespun, self-deprecating, a punchline that arrives by doubling back on itself. That is exactly what makes it dangerous: an unowned aphorism drifts toward whichever dead humorist it sounds most like, and for plain-spoken American wit that is almost always Rogers. Mark Twain absorbs the cynical ones; Rogers absorbs the folksy ones.

The paper trail runs the other way. In its earliest surviving appearances the saying belongs to nobody at all — a Rotarian quotes it in 1932 as a piece of floating wisdom, a wartime newspaper repeats it in 1943 with no named author, and a 1945 Reader's Digest anecdote hands it to a Kentucky old-timer called “Uncle Zeke,” who is himself a story character rather than a documented person. Rogers's name does not enter the record until the chain-email era.

An unowned aphorism drifts toward whichever dead humorist it sounds most like.

The intermediate steps

1943, The Baltimore Sun. The saying resurfaces rendered in folksy dialect and is still credited to no named author — only to an unnamed source of homely wisdom, per Quote Investigator's citation list.

1945, Reader's Digest. An anecdote contributed by Brigadier General John W. Lang has Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. settle an argument by quoting “Uncle Zeke” of his Kentucky home town. The tale spread through newspapers that December, and it is the version most modern paraphrases descend from.

1986 onward. Robert Byrne's quotation collection printed the saying under the name of Barry LePatner, and reference sites picked that credit up. Rogers, LePatner, Rita Mae Brown and “Anonymous” have all carried it since — a signature pattern of a quote with no real owner.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Wisdom Failure Growth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full attribution trailquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor research. Dated citations from 1932 onward and the flat conclusion that “the linkage to Will Rogers was unsupported.”
Wikiquote: Will Rogersen.wikiquote.org

Rogers's sourced quotes, weekly columns, daily telegrams and a Misattributed section. This saying appears in none of them.
Will Rogers Memorial Museum: Will's Quoteswillrogers.com

The official museum quote page. It does not carry this line, and it warns outright that some quotes credited to Rogers are false.
Wikipedia: Will Rogersen.wikipedia.org

Biography and life dates (4 November 1879 – 15 August 1935), including the 1935 Alaska plane crash.
Wikipedia: Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.en.wikipedia.org

The Kentucky-born general who, in the 1945 Reader's Digest anecdote, credits the saying to “Uncle Zeke.”
The Quotations Page: the Barry LePatner creditquotationspage.com

A rival credit still in circulation, listing the saying under Barry LePatner's name with no source given.

Not the author

The man the quote gets pinned on

Will Rogers

1879–1935 · American humorist, newspaper columnist and film star

William Penn Adair Rogers, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation born near Oologah in Indian Territory, went from rope-trick vaudevillian to the Ziegfeld Follies, then to 71 films and more than 4,000 syndicated newspaper columns between 1922 and his death. He died in a plane crash near Utqiaġvik, Alaska, on 15 August 1935, alongside aviator Wiley Post. This particular saying is not his — it is included here because his name is the one most often stamped on it, a hazard of being America's most quotable plain-spoken wit.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Earliest documented in The Muncie Evening Press (Muncie, Indiana), February 17, 1932, 4, where the remark is quoted with no author named. Attribution history traced in “Quote Origin: Good Judgment Depends Mostly on Experience and Experience Usually Comes from Poor Judgment,” Quote Investigator, February 23, 2017.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/good-judgment-comes-from-experience-and-a-lot-of-that-comes/

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