We have an eyewitness account of this one being manufactured. Alva Johnston’s The Great Goldwyn ↗, the first book-length portrait of the producer, published in 1937, calls the line “almost the cornerstone of the Goldwyn legend” and then knocks it down: “Sam did not say it. It was printed late in 1925 in a humorous magazine and credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter.” An executive at the Chaplin studio spotted it, told Charlie Chaplin “It sounds like Sam Goldwyn,” and Chaplin replied, “We’ll pin it on Sam” — then repeated it until it became, in Johnston’s words, a world-famous Goldwynism.
“I Can Tell You in Two Words: Im Possible” not Samuel Goldwyn. Alva Johnston's The Great Goldwyn (Random House, 1937), pp. 27–28, states that “Sam did not say it”: the line “was printed late in 1925 in a humorous magazine and credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter”, and Charlie Chaplin, told by a studio executive that “it sounds like Sam Goldwyn”, replied “We'll pin it on Sam” and repeated it until it stuck. Boller and George's They Never Said It (1989), p. 40, files it as fake on the same authority. Traced by Quotle.info, quotle.info/who-said/i-can-tell-you-in-two-words-im-possible/ · Verbatim: “I can answer you in two words, 'Im possible.'”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Samuel Goldwyn. 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.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of power and doubt. Theme: "I Can Tell You in Two Words: Im Possible". 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 "I Can Tell You in Two Words: Im Possible". 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 line being manufactured, on the record
Earliest account of the origin
Alva Johnston, The Great Goldwyn (Random House, 1937), pp. 27–28
Where it first appeared
An unnamed humorous magazine, late 1925
Who attached it to Goldwyn
Charlie Chaplin, per Johnston: “We’ll pin it on Sam”
Also filed as fake
Boller & George, They Never Said It (1989), p. 40
“I can answer you in two words, ‘Im possible,’” is almost the cornerstone of the Goldwyn legend, but Sam did not say it. It was printed late in 1925 in a humorous magazine and credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter. An executive in the Chaplin studio pointed it out to Charlie Chaplin, saying, “It sounds like Sam Goldwyn.” Chaplin said, “We’ll pin it on Sam,” and he repeated it until it became a world-famous Goldwynism.
Alva Johnston, The Great Goldwyn, 1937, pp. 27-28
Note Johnston’s spelling: “Im possible”, two words, no hyphen — the form this page carries, and the form that makes the joke legible. Wikiquote ↗ and Boller and George ↗ both print it hyphenated and open it “I can answer you”; the version in wide circulation says “I can tell you”. Johnston is also not a disinterested witness: eleven pages earlier, on p. 16 of the same book, he prints “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” as a genuine Goldwyn line, and that one had been in print since 1890.
1937 — the primary account. Alva Johnston’s The Great Goldwyn ↗, pp. 27–28, states that Sam did not say it, dates the first printing to late 1925 in an unnamed humorous magazine, and names Chaplin as the man who attached it to Goldwyn deliberately. The full book is readable on the Internet Archive.
Same book, p. 16 — Johnston describes the machinery: Goldwyn’s publicity department “formerly collected and invented Goldwyn gags and circulated them”, the habit spread beyond them, and “today it takes an expert to pick the genuine Goldwyn lines from the spurious. More people are counterfeiting on Goldwyn than on Uncle Sam.”
1989 —Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George’s They Never Said It ↗ files it as fake on p. 40 and points back to the same authority: “According to Saturday Evening Post writer Alva Johnston, this line first appeared in a humor magazine late in 1925, and was later assigned to Goldwyn.”
Today —Wikiquote ↗ lists it in its Misattributed section for Goldwyn, citing Boller and George, p. 40. In the century since, nobody has produced the magazine.
We assert no rights status. The line was first printed “late in 1925”, which would put it before the 1931 United States public-domain threshold — but Johnston does not name the magazine, nobody since has identified it, and we will not call something public domain on the strength of an unnamed periodical. The excerpt above is a short quotation from a separate work, Alva Johnston’s The Great Goldwyn (Random House, 1937), reproduced here for commentary.
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
A fake with a named culprit
Most invented quotations have no visible author. This one does: a biographer writing in 1937, close enough to the events to name the studio, the executive and the comedian, set down exactly how the line was fastened to Samuel Goldwyn.
Who put it into circulationCharlie Chaplin Popularizer, not author
On Johnston’s account an executive at the Chaplin ↗ studio spotted the gag in the magazine and said “It sounds like Sam Goldwyn.” Chaplin answered “We’ll pin it on Sam,” and repeated it “until it became a world-famous Goldwynism.”
~
The real first printingAn unnamed humorous magazine, late 1925 Earliest in print
Johnston dates it and describes it — the gag was “credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter ↗”, the comic garment-trade partners of the popular plays and films — but he does not name the magazine, and nobody since has produced it.
~
The wording in circulation“I can tell you in two words” Wording drift
Johnston, Boller and George ↗ and Wikiquote ↗ all give the verb as answer, not tell. The hyphen also comes and goes: Johnston prints “Im possible” as two bare words, which is the version that actually reads as the joke.
The interesting thing here is not that the quotation is fake — most Goldwynisms are — but that we can watch it being made. Johnston, writing in 1937 while everyone involved was alive, describes a three-step process: a joke appears anonymously in print; someone in a position to spread it observes that it sounds like a famous man; and the famous man’s name is attached on purpose, as a bit of fun, by a person with a megaphone. That is the whole mechanism of misattribution, documented in one paragraph, decades before anyone had a name for it.
Johnston also explains why Goldwyn in particular. On page 16 of the same book he records that Goldwyn’s own publicity department “collected and invented Goldwyn gags and circulated them”, that the practice had become self-sustaining, and that “more people are counterfeiting on Goldwyn than on Uncle Sam.” A studio built the magnet, and then the magnet worked on its own.
“It sounds like Sam Goldwyn.” “We’ll pin it on Sam.” That is the entire origin of a world-famous quotation.
Potash and Perlmutter, and why the gag sounded like Goldwyn
Johnston says the 1925 gag was “credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter”. Potash and Perlmutter ↗ were comic Jewish characters created by Montague Glass and Charles Klein for a 1913 Broadway play that ran for 441 performances, itself drawn from Glass’s 1909 book of the same name. They were stock comic figures of the period, which is the register the line was written in — a joke with no real person attached to it at all.
And there is a coincidence worth noticing, though Johnston does not draw the connection himself: the first feature Samuel Goldwyn Productions ↗ ever released, in September 1923, was Potash and Perlmutter. Whether that is why a Chaplin executive thought the gag “sounds like Sam Goldwyn” is our inference and nobody’s finding — but the two men and the two fictional ones were already in the same sentence.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1879 or 1882–1974 · Polish-born American film producer
Samuel Goldwyn, born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, produced the first major American motion picture and founded or co-founded several studios; the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer name is half his. He is also the twentieth century’s most productive magnet for invented quotations, and the reason is documented rather than mysterious. Wikipedia ↗ states it plainly: “Goldwynisms were the inventions of humorists and newspaper editors,” and “many famous Goldwynisms predate Goldwyn’s career.” He was amused at first and irritated later. Boller and George quote his own final verdict on the genre: “None of them are true. They’re all made up by a bunch of comedians and pinned on me.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented account of the origin
Alva Johnston, The Great Goldwyn (New York: Random House, 1937), 27–28: the line “was printed late in 1925 in a humorous magazine and credited to an anonymous Potash or Perlmutter”, and Charlie Chaplin “said, ‘We’ll pin it on Sam.’” See also Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, They Never Said It (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 40.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I Can Tell You in Two Words: Im Possible’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-can-tell-you-in-two-words-im-possible/