Rogers put the exact words in print himself. In weekly article no. 219, “Rogers Gets Six Shiny Dimes From Oil King,” published in the Tulsa Daily World on 20 February 1927, he writes that John D. Rockefeller “sure carried out my old saying, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’” He was already calling it an old saying then — and he was still using it three years later when he offered it, in a longer form, as his own epitaph.
“I never met a man I didn't like” Will Rogers, "Rogers Gets Six Shiny Dimes From Oil King," weekly article no. 219, Tulsa Daily World, 20 February 1927. Verified at Quotle.info.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Weekly article no. 219, “Rogers Gets Six Shiny Dimes From Oil King”
First published
Tulsa Daily World, 20 February 1927
Spoken version
Tremont Temple Baptist Church, Boston — reported 16 June 1930
Edition consulted
Will Rogers’ Weekly Articles, Vol. 2: The Coolidge Years, 1925–1927, ed. Smallwood & Gragert (Oklahoma State University Press, 1978; online reprint, Will Rogers Memorial Museums, 2010)
He gave me my dimes all of them and I didn’t even ask him. Well, I might have hinted a little. He is a Baptist, but he certainly is not a narrow one. For there was Father Lennon, who he spoke so often of, what a “fine man Father was.” John D. sure carried out my old saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”
Weekly article no. 219 · 1927
Rogers had played a show at Daytona Beach the night before, and the 87-year-old John D. Rockefeller was in the audience; he asked Rogers to breakfast at eight the next morning and handed out his famous dimes at the door — six of them, one for Rogers and one each for his wife, his three children and his sister. He did not play the golf that followed — “I told him I didn’t play but that I would go over with them” — and picked up one more dime for watching. Note that he introduces the line as “my old saying” — it was already stock by early 1927.
6 November 1926 — the earliest dated version yet found. Writing about having missed Leon Trotsky in Russia, Rogers says he would have found him “a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I dident like.” Wikiquote ↗ attributes it to the Saturday Evening Post and notes Rogers’ own spelling.
20 February 1927 — the exact modern wording, in Rogers’ own syndicated weekly article no. 219 on John D. Rockefeller: “John D. sure carried out my old saying, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’” Weekly Articles, Vol. 2 ↗
16 June 1930 — the epitaph version goes national. Under the headline “Will Rogers Likes Everyone,” page one of the New Britain Herald reports that Rogers told an audience at Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston the night before what he had prepared for his tombstone. Library of Congress ↗
29 June 1930 — Rogers explains the line, tying it to how he got away with kidding public men: “I have always said I never met a man I dident like.” Weekly Articles, Vol. 4 ↗
✓Public domain
The wording is documented in Rogers’ syndicated weekly article of 20 February 1927 and in United States newspapers of June 1930 — all published well before 1931, so the text quoted here is in the public domain. The 1978 Oklahoma State University Press volume and its 2010 online reprint are editorial compilations; the 1927 column text they reproduce is not itself under copyright.
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
What gets garbled
Nobody else has a serious claim on this sentence — the trouble is with its shape, its date, and with Rogers himself, who at some point tried to disown it.
~
Wording“I joked about every prominent man of my time…” mis-worded
The famous epitaph sentence circulates with “of my time.” The wire report of the Boston remark carried on page one of the New Britain Herald for 16 June 1930 prints “lifetime” instead — “I joked about every prominent man in my lifetime, but I never met a man I didn’t like” (Library of Congress ↗). Wikiquote lists both forms.
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Spelling“didn’t” vs Rogers’ “dident” tidied up
Rogers spelled it his own way. Wikiquote flags the 1926 version as deliberately “dident,” and his weekly article published 29 June 1930 reads “I never met a man I dident like” (Weekly Articles, Vol. 4 ↗). The 1927 column is printed with the standard spelling.
✕
Date“He first said it in Boston in 1930” mis-dated
That claim traces to Paula McSpadden Love’s The Will Rogers Book (1972), which says the remark was first printed in the Boston Globe of 16 June 1930. Wikiquote quotes her note and then records earlier uses — the 1926 Trotsky remark and the 1927 column (Wikiquote ↗).
✕
The speakerWill Rogers, disowning his own line disputed by the author
In the London Review of Books, Michael Rogin wrote that “Will Rogers denied ever uttering his signature phrase” and that Rogers claimed his actual words were “I never kidded a man I didn’t like” (LRB ↗). His own columns undercut the denial — and show why the two versions blur together, since he used the “met” form precisely to explain his kidding.
✓The line really is Rogers’. He was calling it “my old saying” in a column published 20 February 1927 ↗; what travels is a trimmed, tidied fragment of the longer sentence he wanted on his tombstone.
Context
Why it mattered
Rogers made a living ridiculing the most powerful men in America — presidents, senators, Rockefeller — and somehow kept being invited back. The line was his own explanation of the trick. In a weekly article published in the Tulsa Daily World on 29 June 1930 he set it out plainly: he had “often said in answer to inquiries as to how I got away with kidding some of our public men, that it was because I liked all of them personally, and that if there was no malice in your heart there could be none in your ‘Gags,’ and I have always said I never met a man I dident like.” (Weekly Articles, Vol. 4 ↗)
Stripped of that setup, the sentence turns into a greeting-card sentiment about universal goodwill. In its native habitat it is a working humorist’s licence — the reason a cowboy from Indian Territory could call a sitting president a fool in 500 newspapers and be thanked for it.
I have always said I never met a man I dident like.
The version before the version
Wikiquote records an earlier and slightly different form: writing about having missed Leon Trotsky on his 1926 trip to Russia, Rogers said he would have found him “a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I dident like.” Wikiquote dates that to the Saturday Evening Post of 6 November 1926 and calls it “the earliest dated citation of such a remark thus far found in research” (Wikiquote ↗).
By February 1927 the sentence had settled into the shape everyone knows, and Rogers was introducing it as something he had been saying for a while.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1879–1935 · Cherokee humorist, roper, syndicated columnist & film star
Born in 1879 near Oologah in Indian Territory, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Will Rogers went from trick roper in wild west shows to the Ziegfeld Follies, then to Hollywood and to the biggest newspaper readership in America. Between 1922 and his death he wrote thousands of syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, needling presidents, senators and oil barons in the voice of a man who had wandered in from the corral. He died on 15 August 1935 in a plane crash in Alaska Territory with the aviator Wiley Post.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Will Rogers, “Rogers Gets Six Shiny Dimes From Oil King,” weekly article no. 219, Tulsa Daily World, February 20, 1927; reprinted in Will Rogers’ Weekly Articles, Volume 2: The Coolidge Years, 1925–1927, ed. James M. Smallwood and Steven K. Gragert (Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1978; rev. online ed., Claremore, OK: Will Rogers Memorial Museums, 2010).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I never met a man I didn't like’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-never-met-a-man-i-didnt-like/