I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital
Not Will Rogers — anonymous 1920 advertising copyAnonymous copywriter (in print by April 1920)Earliest documented in US investment advertising, 27 April 1920 · popularized by Eddie Cantor from 1933
Will Rogers is not documented as having said or written this. Quote Investigator traces the “return on / return of” wordplay to unsigned bond advertising — a Prudence-Bonds ad in The New York Times of 27 April 1920 — and states that it “hypothesizes that an anonymous copywriter crafted this wordplay by 1920.” Comedian Eddie Cantor, wiped out in the 1929 crash, was using a version by October 1933. Rogers died on 15 August 1935; the first advertisement crediting him ran on 22 August 1938, and QI concludes “the evidence supporting the ascription to Rogers was not substantive.” Wikiquote files this exact “capital” wording under Misattributed.
“I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital” Not Will Rogers. The "return on / return of" wordplay appears in US investment advertising by 27 April 1920 with no named author; Eddie Cantor used a version from October 1933; Rogers was first credited in an August 1938 advertisement, three years after his death. Sources: Quote Investigator (2025); Wikiquote lists this wording under "Misattributed."
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Will Rogers. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? 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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Provenance
Where the wordplay actually comes from
Popularly credited to
Will Rogers (1879–1935)
Earliest documented form
Prudence-Bonds advertisement, The New York Times, 27 April 1920 — unsigned advertising copy
Earliest named user
Eddie Cantor, Sarasota Herald, October 1933
First credited to Rogers
Advertisement, Oregon Daily Journal (Portland), 22 August 1938 — three years after his death
Of course, you can get a bigger return on your money, provided you accept a reduction in security. But please bear this in mind: When we talk of the 100% soundness of Prudence-Bonds, we have in mind, not only the return on your money, but the return of your money.
Advertisement, The New York Times, 27 April 1920
This is the earliest documented appearance of the wordplay identified by Quote Investigator — anonymous copy selling mortgage bonds, not a humorist’s quip. A second 1920 example ran in the Ottawa Evening Citizen on 3 June 1920. The familiar “capital” sentence is a much later restatement; QI’s article does not use the word “capital” at all.
Quote Investigator dates the earliest matches to two 1920 advertisements — The New York Times, 27 April 1920, and the Ottawa Evening Citizen, 3 June 1920 (“See that you get not only a good return ON your money, but the return OF your money eventually”) — both unsigned.
Eddie Cantor, whose fortune was destroyed in the 1929 crash, used it in the Sarasota Herald in October 1933 and again in January 1934: “The first thing I learned was to worry about the return of my money instead of the return on my money,” per QI.
Rogers died on 15 August 1935. The first advertisement crediting him ran in the Oregon Daily Journal on 22 August 1938; QI notes the three-year delay “reduced the credibility of the attribution.”
Wikiquote lists the modern “capital” wording under Misattributed and points to The National Underwriter, Volume 45 (1941), p. 12: “As Eddie Cantor put it years ago, after getting burned in the stock market, the life insurance policyholder is more interested in the return of his money than in the return on it.”
The “return on capital / return of capital” wording has no identifiable author and no first-publication anchor — the nearest documented ancestor is anonymous 1920 advertising copy, and the modern phrasing surfaces only in later twentieth- and twenty-first-century investing writing. With no source work to date, no copyright status can be responsibly asserted for this sentence.
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
How Will Rogers got the credit
This is a quip that was sold rather than spoken: it began as advertising copy, was adopted by a comedian who had genuinely been ruined by the market, and was then pinned on two long-dead famous Americans by later advertisers.
✕
The exact quoteWill Rogers Misattributed
Wikiquote lists this precise “return on capital / return of capital” wording under Misattributed, citing its appearance in Forbes Guide to the Markets (2009) and The Prudent Professor (2011). Rogers died on 15 August 1935; Quote Investigator found the first advertisement crediting him — in the Oregon Daily Journal of Portland, 22 August 1938 — three years after his death, and concluded “the evidence supporting the ascription to Rogers was not substantive.”
✕
A later stray creditBenjamin Franklin Impossible
Franklin died in 1790. According to Quote Investigator, the first attribution to him appeared only in 1966, in a financial advertisement in The Houston Post, in the form “I’m not so much interested in the return on my money as the return of my money.”
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The nearest genuine claimantEddie Cantor Documented user, not originator
Cantor is the first identifiable person on record using the wordplay — in the Sarasota Herald, October 1933 (“It’s to look not so much for a return on your money as for a return of your money!”) and again in January 1934, per Quote Investigator. But QI dates the wordplay itself to 1920 advertising, so Cantor popularised it rather than invented it.
✓There is no famous author: Quote Investigator “hypothesizes that an anonymous copywriter crafted this wordplay by 1920,” with the earliest documented instance a Prudence-Bonds advertisement in The New York Times of 27 April 1920 — eighteen years before the earliest claim made on Will Rogers’s behalf.
Context
Why this one stuck to Will Rogers
The line is a piece of advertising jujitsu: it takes the most familiar phrase in finance — return on your money — and flips one preposition to make the whole promise of investing sound like a con. That is exactly the kind of plain-spoken deflation of Wall Street that Americans associate with Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist whose stock in trade was puncturing experts. Attribution follows temperament more often than evidence, and a quip that sounds like someone eventually gets filed under their name.
The timing is the tell. Quote Investigator finds the wordplay already at work in 1920 bond advertisements, years before the crash that made it feel prophetic; it was Eddie Cantor, who genuinely lost a fortune in 1929, who carried it into the Depression. Rogers received the credit only posthumously, in an advertisement — which is how a great many of his “quotes” were manufactured.
A copywriter selling bonds in 1920 wrote the best line in American investing — and never got his name on it.
Read the full story
Will Rogers is one of the most quote-magnetised names in American English. Quote Investigator maintains a whole index of sayings pinned on him, including “Even If You Are On the Right Track You Will Get Run Over If You Just Sit There” and “Buy Land; They’re Not Making It Anymore.”
The “capital” phrasing on this page is a modern restatement rather than any documented period wording. Wikiquote cites its appearance in twenty-first-century investing books — Forbes Guide to the Markets (2009) and The Prudent Professor (2011) — and points instead to The National Underwriter, Volume 45 (1941), which credited Eddie Cantor.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1892–1964 · American comedian, singer, songwriter & radio star
Eddie Cantor (born Isidore Itzkowitz) was one of the biggest stars of American vaudeville, Broadway, film and radio — and, per Wikipedia, “the 1929 stock market crash took away his multimillionaire status and left him deeply in debt.” He turned the disaster into comedy with the bestselling Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929) and Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity! (1931), which made him an unlikely folk authority on losing money. He is the first identifiable person documented using this wordplay — in the Sarasota Herald in October 1933 — though Quote Investigator shows it was already circulating anonymously in 1920 advertising, so he popularised it rather than coined it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented source
Garson O’Toole (Gregory F. Sullivan), “Quote Origin: I Worry More About the Return OF My Money Than the Return ON My Money,” Quote Investigator, June 27, 2025, citing a Prudence-Bonds advertisement in The New York Times, April 27, 1920. The “return on capital / return of capital” wording is listed under “Misattributed” on the Wikiquote page for Will Rogers.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-am-not-so-much-concerned-with-the-return-on-capital-as-i/