Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

I never vote for anybody. I always vote against

Not H. L. Mencken — W. C. Fields, as told by his biographer W. C. Fields 1880–1946 · American comedian, actor and juggler
Disputed In copyright

The first-person wording is on record as Fields’s only in Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1949 biography W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes — “Hell, I never vote for anybody,” cried Fields, incensed, “I always vote against” — a biographer’s report of a remark, not anything Fields wrote. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the joke back to Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker in 1893; Mencken published a differently worded, third-person version in 1926 and opened it by disclaiming credit.

Last verified 10 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I never vote for anybody. I always vote against” W. C. Fields, as recounted in Robert Lewis Taylor, W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (Doubleday, 1949), p. 275. Commonly misattributed to H. L. Mencken; the saying traces to Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker in 1893. · Verbatim: “Hell, I never vote for anybody … I always vote against.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to H. L. Mencken. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Robert Lewis Taylor and the original publisher, Doubleday & Company). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of W. C. Fields — American comedian, actor and juggler. Theme: "I never vote for anybody. I always vote against". 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 never vote for anybody. I always vote against". 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 book that put the wording in print

Work
W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes
Author
Robert Lewis Taylor
Published
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1949 — quote at page 275
Status
Reported speech: a biographer’s account of a remark, not Fields’s own writing

Hell, I never vote for anybody … I always vote against. Reported speech, 1949

Taylor prints it as split dialogue on page 275 — “Hell, I never vote for anybody,” cried Fields, incensed, “I always vote against.” — so the ellipsis above marks the narration removed, not a cut in Fields’s words. This is the line Quote Investigator ↗ quotes from that page. The popular form drops the opening “Hell” and tidies the punctuation; Wikiquote ↗ carries it in the past tense, as “I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.”

Scan of the 1949 biography (borrowable)
Read it at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1893 to 1949

How the line travelled

  • 1893 — the template. An untitled filler item in the Harrisburg Telegraph of 30 October 1893 has Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker defining a mugwump as a man who always votes against somebody and never votes for anybody. This is the earliest match located by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1926 — what Mencken actually wrote. Notes on Democracy reads: “It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something.” Third person, and credited to nobody in particular. Verified in the Project Gutenberg text ↗.
  • 1930 — the first person arrives, unattributed. The Reverend Fred Alban Weil’s “Week’s Sermonette: Prejudice and Good Will” in the Statesman Journal of Salem, Oregon, 25 October 1930, page 10, quotes an unnamed voter: “I never vote for anybody, I always vote against somebody.” Nineteen years before Taylor’s book, and already almost the modern wording — located by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1949 — the wording attaches to Fields. Robert Lewis Taylor’s biography of Fields, page 275, prints it as dialogue: “Hell, I never vote for anybody,” cried Fields, incensed, “I always vote against.” Wikiquote ↗ lists the line under Fields, sourced to the same book.
  • The verdict. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Croker created the template by 1893, and that Adams and Mencken, who both used later variants, disclaimed credit.
In copyright

The exact wording quoted here first reached print in a 1949 book — Robert Lewis Taylor’s W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes — which remains in copyright in the United States, so only the single sentence is reproduced. Mencken’s own, differently worded version is public domain: Notes on Democracy was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 1926 and is free at Project Gutenberg ↗.

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

Four famous names, none of them the coiner

This line is handed around between a critic, a columnist, a comedian and a president. Only one of them is documented saying it in the first person, and even he was being quoted by somebody else.

H. L. Mencken not his wording

Mencken did publish the thought — “It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something” in Notes on Democracy (1926) — but it is third person, it is not the line people quote, and the opening clause hands the credit to someone else. Read the passage ↗

W. C. Fields reported, not written

The first-person quip is Fields’s only as recounted by biographer Robert Lewis Taylor in 1949, after Fields’s death in 1946; no writing or transcript of Fields’s own carries it, and the same first-person form was already in print, unowned, in 1930. Quote Investigator ↗

Franklin P. Adams disclaimed

Adams used a version in his “Conning Tower” column in 1916 and, like Mencken, disclaimed credit for it, according to Quote Investigator ↗.

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1936 press attribution

By October 1936 a variant of the saying was being ascribed to President Roosevelt in the newspapers — the Lubbock Morning Avalanche of 6 October 1936, per Quote Investigator ↗.

The oldest documented form belongs to Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker, using it in 1893 to define a mugwump; Quote Investigator ↗ credits him with creating the template for the whole family of sayings.

Context

Why this joke keeps changing owners

The line survives because it describes something real about American elections: the negative vote. Croker used it as an insult. In his telling a mugwump — one of the Republican reformers ↗ who had bolted to Grover Cleveland in 1884 — was a man with nothing left to be for.

By the time Mencken reached for the idea it was already a commonplace, and he said so in the sentence itself. What made it quotable was the shift into the first person: not an observation about voters, but a confession by one. That form was already loose and unowned by 1930, when a Salem sermonette put it in the mouth of an anonymous voter; what Taylor’s 1949 biography did was pin it on Fields, not invent it. And it is the form that keeps landing on Mencken, whose standing as America’s great political sourpuss makes him a plausible-looking home for almost any cynical line about democracy.

Mencken’s version opens “It was long ago observed…” — he was reporting the joke, not making it.

The wider family of sayings

Quote Investigator ↗ tracks at least eight stops for this idea, including a second Croker instance in the Chicago Chronicle of 22 November 1897 and a 1930 sermonette by the Reverend Fred Alban Weil.

The same page records an earlier Mencken instance than the book: his “States’ Rights” column in the Baltimore Evening Sun of 12 October 1925, which carries the same third-person observation he later folded into Notes on Democracy.

Franklin P. Adams used a version in his “Conning Tower” column in 1916, and by October 1936 a variant was being credited in the press to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — neither of them the first-person quip people quote today.

Explore

Filed under

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

Doubt Power Freedom

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 Origin: I Never Vote For Anybody. I Always Vote Againstquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive chronology, 1893 to 1949, with newspaper citations for Croker, Adams, Mencken, Weil, FDR and Fields.
Notes on Democracy (1926), full textgutenberg.org

Mencken’s book, where his actual sentence about the plain people voting against something appears.
Wikiquote: W. C. Fieldsen.wikiquote.org

Lists the voting line under Fields, sourced to Taylor’s biography, with a past-tense variant.
Wikiquote: H. L. Menckenen.wikiquote.org

Mencken’s collected quotations — the first-person voting line is not among them.
W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (1949)archive.org

Scan of Robert Lewis Taylor’s biography, the book that put the wording in print; borrowable.
Richard Crokeren.wikipedia.org

The Tammany Hall boss Quote Investigator credits with the earliest documented version of the saying.

The comedian, not the critic

The man the wording actually belongs to

W. C. Fields

1880–1946 · American comedian, actor and juggler

Born William Claude Dukenfield, Fields worked up from vaudeville juggling to Broadway and then to film, where he built a career on the persona of a muttering, hard-drinking misanthrope who trusted no institution and few people. That persona is a magnet for lines he may never have said — he leaned into it himself with a joke campaign book, Fields for President, during the 1940 election. The voting quip reached print in 1949, after his death in 1946, in his first major biography.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Robert Lewis Taylor, W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1949), 275. Earliest documented form of the saying: Richard Croker, in an untitled filler item, Harrisburg Telegraph, October 30, 1893, per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: I Never Vote For Anybody. I Always Vote Against,” December 6, 2020 (updated March 26, 2025).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I never vote for anybody. I always vote against’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-never-vote-for-anybody-i-always-vote-against/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied