The sentiment is Morgan’s; this sentence is not. The earliest known form of the yacht story appears in The Wall Street Journal on 14 September 1926 — thirteen years after Morgan died — and has him saying only “If there is any doubt in your mind, you can’t,” which is why Ralph Keyes’s The Quote Verifier returns the verdict “Morgan’s sentiments, not his words.”
“If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it” popularly credited to J. P. Morgan (1837–1913), but not in his words. The earliest known form of the yacht anecdote is "Can You Afford a Yacht?", The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1926, p. 2 — thirteen years after Morgan died — where his reply is only "If there is any doubt in your mind, you can't." Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 2, finds no dependable evidence for the familiar line: "Morgan's sentiments, not his words."
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In context
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Provenance
The earliest documented version — and it is not this one
Earliest known form
Can You Afford a Yacht?
Published
The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1926, p. 2 — thirteen years after Morgan’s death
What Morgan reportedly said
“If there is any doubt in your mind, you can’t.”
Verdict
“Morgan’s sentiments, not his words” — Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 2
There are two degrees of millionaires: the kind who can afford a yacht, and those who can’t. At least that is what the late J. P. Morgan seemed to think. … A banker … one day decided he needed only a yacht to round out his possessions. … “John,” he said, “do you think I can afford a yacht?” And the answer was: “If there is any doubt in your mind, you can’t.”
1926 · The Wall Street Journal
Two things to notice. The paper already calls him the late J. P. Morgan — this is a story told about a dead man, not a line anyone recorded him saying. And the wording is nothing like the proverb: no “price,” no “afford it,” no epigram.
14 September 1926 — the first known form. The Wall Street Journal runs “Can You Afford a Yacht?”, in which a banker asks “the late J. P. Morgan” whether he can afford one and gets the reply “If there is any doubt in your mind, you can’t.” Popik transcribes the piece in full ↗
1929–1936 — the anecdote hardens while the wording keeps sliding. The Washington Post has “No man who asks himself that question can afford to own a yacht” (1929); Irvin S. Cobb’s Both Sides of the Street has “If you’re not sure you can, you can’t!” (1930); Winthrop P. Moore’s Yachts: Their Care and Handling has “If you have to consider the cost of running the yacht, then you can’t afford to own one” (1936). Each is dated in Popik’s file ↗
26 April 1938 — the modern phrasing surfaces in print, and in this telling it belongs to nobody. The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida quotes an unnamed observer on horse racing: “It’s like owning a yacht. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford one.” No Morgan, no attribution at all — it is simply a saying. See the 1938 citation ↗
26 August 1938 — four months later the near-modern wording is back on Morgan, and already being called famous. The Lima (OH) News notes that a yacht’s upkeep “runs into five figures yearly — which forms the basis for the elder J. P. Morgan’s famous comment, when asked by a friend how much it cost to keep up a yacht: ‘If you have to ask such a question, you can’t afford one.’” Morgan’s name is attached in every dated citation from 1926 on except the April 1938 one. Popik dates this citation too ↗
1961 — the exact modern wording is in print under Morgan’s name in a reference-style source. Wikiquote’s only citation for the familiar wording is Business Education World (Gregg Publishing Company, 1961), and the entry sits under “Attributed,” inside the page’s disputed markers. J. P. Morgan on Wikiquote ↗
No rights status can honestly be asserted for this wording, because no authored source for it has been found. The sentence first appears in the record as an unattributed yachting saying in a 1938 newspaper, and the reference works that have looked for a Morgan original — Keyes, Shapiro, Strouse — did not find one. The 1926 Wall Street Journal item quoted above is a pre-1931 United States periodical and is free of copyright, but that text is not this line.
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
Who it gets pinned on, and why
This is one of the most quoted things J. P. Morgan never quite said. The situation is real — Morgan owned yachts, and people did ask him what they cost — but the epigram is a retelling artifact that sharpened over about forty years of newspaper columns.
✕
The line as usually printedJ. P. Morgan (1837–1913) no evidence
Ralph Keyes’s The Quote Verifier (2006) states that no dependable evidence exists that Morgan said this, and that biographer Jean Strouse doubts he did, calling the mot “implausible.” Keyes’s verdict: “Morgan’s sentiments, not his words.” The passage is reproduced in Popik’s file ↗
✕
The underlying thoughtCornelius Vanderbilt rival claim
Keyes notes in passing that “Some attribute the thought to Cornelius Vanderbilt” — offering no source for that version either. It is the same pattern: a Gilded Age name large enough to carry the joke. Keyes, quoted by Popik ↗
✕
The Corsair IV versionJ. P. Morgan Jr. (1867–1943) shipyard legend
A separate strand of the story belongs to Morgan’s son: “Legend at the shipyard credits the phrase ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it’ to Morgan, when asked what the yacht cost.” That yacht, Corsair IV, was built in 1930 — seventeen years after the elder Morgan’s death — so any telling that puts the Corsair IV exchange in the father’s mouth is impossible on its face. Wikipedia on J. P. Morgan Jr. ↗
✓The closest thing to this on the record is a different sentence. The Yale Book of Quotations gives Morgan, on owning a yacht, as “If it makes the slightest difference to you what it costs, don’t try it” — sourced to a 20 May 1927 letter from W. P. Bonbright to Herbert L. Satterlee, which Jean Strouse found among the papers in the Pierpont Morgan Library. That too is a recollection written down after Morgan’s death; Strouse’s closest on-the-record analogue is Morgan’s reply to oil baron Henry Clay Pierce, “You have no right to own a yacht if you ask that question.” Both are documented in Popik’s file ↗
Context
Why this one stuck
Morgan is the perfect host for this joke, which is exactly the problem. He ran a fleet of black steam yachts called Corsair, he was the era’s shorthand for unanswerable money, and he died in 1913 — early enough that by the time the anecdote reached print in 1926 there was nobody left to check it against. Every version in the record is a story someone told about Morgan, never a line anyone took down as he spoke.
What the dated citations actually show is a sentence being polished in public. The 1926 reply is flat and conversational. Over the next decade it picks up rhythm, drops the yacht, and by April 1938 it is also running in the papers as a free-floating proverb with no owner at all. Four months after that it is back on Morgan in near-modern wording, the Lima (OH) News already calling it his famous comment — a finished epigram sharper than anything he is documented as saying.
Morgan’s sentiments, not his words.
One more thing the record does not contain
It is sometimes suggested the saying is older than Morgan’s yachts. Popik’s file does log an earlier yachting item — Lawrence Perry’s “The Expense of Yachting” in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, August 1901 — but it contains no such maxim. It is an anecdote about a man who said no one could spend more than $100,000 a year and then bought a steam yacht that cost him $70,000 a year to run. The joke is the same; the sentence is not there. Popik’s own conclusion stands: the first known form of the saying dates to only 1926.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1837–1913 · American financier, banker and art collector
John Pierpont Morgan was the most powerful private banker of America’s Gilded Age — the man who assembled General Electric and U.S. Steel and twice helped shore up the federal government’s finances. He was also a conspicuous yachtsman, running a succession of steam yachts named Corsair, which is why so many Gilded Age anecdotes about rich men and price tags eventually drifted onto him. His biographer Jean Strouse is blunt about the mismatch between the man and the maxim: Morgan was, she wrote, “a singularly inarticulate, unreflective man, not likely to come up with a maxim worthy of Oscar Wilde.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented form
“Can You Afford a Yacht?” The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 1926, p. 2 — the first known form of the saying, per Barry Popik, “If you have to ask, then you probably can’t afford it (J. P. Morgan?),” The Big Apple, June 30, 2009. The familiar wording is not documented from Morgan: Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 2 — “Morgan’s sentiments, not his words.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-have-to-ask-the-price-you-cant-afford-it/