If I Am To Speak Ten Minutes, I Need a Week for Preparation; If an Hour, I Am Ready Now
Not Lincoln — an anonymous saying, credited to Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson1856–1924 · 28th U.S. President; earlier a Princeton professor and university president
This exact four-part wording is documented only in Woodrow Wilson’s mouth, and only secondhand: it first appears in Josephus Daniels’s 1946 memoir The Wilson Era, published many years after Wilson’s death in 1924. The single link to Abraham Lincoln is one 1893 remark by a California governor, quoting a shorter two-part version decades after Lincoln died in 1865. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the joke back to the 1890s and labels the whole family anonymous.
“If I Am To Speak Ten Minutes, I Need a Week for Preparation; If an Hour, I Am Ready Now” attributed to Woodrow Wilson in Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917–1923 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 624. Not Abraham Lincoln: Quote Investigator traces the saying to an anonymous template already circulating in the 1890s. Via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Abraham Lincoln. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Woodrow Wilson — 28th U.S. President; earlier a Princeton professor and university president. Theme: "If I Am To Speak Ten Minutes, I Need a Week for Preparation; If an Hour, I Am Ready Now". 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.
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Provenance
Where this wording actually comes from
Earliest text with this wording
The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917–1923
Author & imprint
Josephus Daniels · University of North Carolina Press, 1946 · page 624
Closest earlier variant
The Operative Miller, April 1918, page 130 — also credited to Wilson, different wording
The Lincoln link
A single 1893 ascription by Governor H. H. Markham of California — a shorter, different remark
A member of the Cabinet congratulated Wilson on introducing the vogue of short speeches and asked him about the time it took him to prepare his speeches. He said: “It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”
Secondhand, 1946
As reported by Josephus Daniels, a member of Wilson’s Cabinet, in his 1946 memoir — published many years after Wilson’s death in 1924. It is a recollection of a conversation, not a transcript, and no contemporary record of the exchange has been located.
1893 — the Lincoln link, and it is the only one. In his first biennial message to the California legislature, Governor H. H. Markham said Lincoln had claimed he had no time to prepare five-minute speeches but could speak an hour at any time. Two parts, not four, and offered decades after Lincoln died in 1865 — Quote Investigator ↗.
1895–1922 — the joke floats free. It is pinned on Rufus Choate in an 1895 Rockford newspaper, used with no attribution by a doctor at the New Hampshire Medical Society in 1900 and in Grenville Kleiser’s 1915 public-speaking guide, and handed to Macaulay in a 1922 high-school manual — the ADS-L posting lists them all ↗.
1918 — Wilson enters. The flour-milling trade journal The Operative Miller printed a close variant in Wilson’s mouth, its last stage running “if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.” This is the earliest Wilson ascription QI located — Quote Investigator ↗.
1946 — the wording we quote today. Josephus Daniels’s memoir of the Wilson years ↗ sets the joke into the familiar ten/fifteen/thirty/sixty ladder at page 624, a page QI verified against scans ↗. The major quotation references carrying this wording — Respectfully Quoted (1989), Cassell’s Humorous Quotations (2001) and The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) — all cite Daniels for it.
The only located text carrying this exact wording is Josephus Daniels’s The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917–1923, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1946. US works published between 1929 and 1963 kept their copyright only where it was renewed in the 28th year; we have not located a renewal record either way, so we treat the book as in copyright. The closest earlier variant, in The Operative Miller of April 1918, is old enough to be public domain, but it is a materially different wording and not the sentence quoted on this page.
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
Six famous men, one joke
This is not a quotation with one bad attribution — it is a joke that has been reassigned to a new famous speaker roughly every generation. Quote Investigator documents each hop, and notes that the ascriptions to Lincoln, Choate and Twain are all especially weak because every one of them was made long after the named man was dead.
✕
The popular creditAbraham Lincoln 1893
Governor H. H. Markham of California told the state legislature, in his first biennial message of 3 January 1893, that Lincoln had said he had no time to prepare five-minute speeches but could speak an hour at any time. It is a two-part remark, not the four-part ladder quoted today, and Lincoln had died in 1865 — Quote Investigator ↗ calls the linkage weak on exactly those grounds.
✕
An earlier claimantRufus Choate 1895
A minister named J. N. Hall credited the joke to the Massachusetts orator and senator at a Rockford, Illinois club meeting reported in December 1895, in a three-part version ending “but if I am to talk all day I’m ready now.” Choate had died in 1859 — ADS-L ↗.
✕
A British claimantThomas Babington Macaulay 1922
A high-school manual, Public Speaking Today, put a version in Macaulay’s mouth — and reversed the arithmetic, giving two days for a two-hour speech and two months for a ten-minute one. Macaulay had also died in 1859 — Quote Investigator ↗.
✕
A presidential claimantWilliam Howard Taft 1985
The diplomat Andor C. Klay told a version as a Taft anecdote in remarks printed by the New York Times in December 1985, ending with Taft drawing himself up and saying “Gentlemen, I am ready, now!” — Quote Investigator ↗.
✕
The internet-era claimantMark Twain by 1998
A public-speaking consultancy’s website was carrying a Twain version by February 1998, the standard fate of any quotable joke once it reaches the web — Quote Investigator ↗.
✓Between 1895 and 1922 the same joke also appears with no attribution at all — from a doctor at the New Hampshire Medical Society in 1900, from Grenville Kleiser’s 1915 public-speaking guide, and from an unnamed college professor recalled at a 1922 fraternity dinner. That anonymous middle is the real story: Quote Investigator concludes the set has no single author ↗.
Context
Why this one lands on Lincoln
Sayings about the difficulty of being brief drift toward whoever is most famous for being brief. Lincoln is the obvious magnet: a president remembered above all for a few minutes at Gettysburg is exactly the person a story about short speeches wants to be about. That pull is strong enough that a sitting governor reached for it in 1893, and strong enough that the line still circulates under Lincoln’s name today.
But the paper trail runs the other way. Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the joke moving between speakers for decades — Choate, an unnamed doctor, an anonymous orator in a textbook, Macaulay, a college professor, Wilson, Taft, Twain — with the wording reshuffling each time. A saying that fits that many mouths belongs to none of them.
The joke is older than every famous man it has been pinned on.
Read the full story
The variability is the tell. In 1895 the punchline is “if I am to talk all day I’m ready now.” In 1918 it is “if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all.” In 1943 a Boston paper makes the last stage a two-hour speech. Only in 1946 does it settle into the tidy ten/fifteen/thirty/sixty ladder people quote now.
One 1922 version, credited to Macaulay, even runs the ratios backwards from the others — two months for a ten-minute speech, two days for a two-hour one. A stable quotation does not behave like this. A joke passed around by public speakers does.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1924 · 28th U.S. President; earlier a Princeton professor and university president
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. Before politics he was a professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton and then president of the university, and it is that academic world — not the White House — that Quote Investigator points to as the likely home of this joke. QI concludes Wilson probably did use a version of it, but was reaching for a template already in circulation, which is why the saying is best described as anonymous rather than his invention.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest text with this wording
Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917–1923 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 624. Per Quote Investigator, this is the earliest located text carrying this exact four-part wording; a close variant crediting Wilson appeared in The Operative Miller (April 1918), 130.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If I Am To Speak Ten Minutes, I Need a Week for Preparation; If an Hour, I Am Ready Now’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-i-am-to-speak-ten-minutes-i-need-a-week-for-preparation/