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

Who really said it

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers

Not Truman’s wording — a later paraphrase Harry S. Truman 1884–1972 · 33rd President of the United States
Disputed In copyright

The thought is genuinely Truman’s, but the sentence is not. What he actually put down was “Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers” — part of a longer note printed in Monte M. Poen’s edition of Truman’s unsent letters and desk notes ↗ and in Robert H. Ferrell’s edition of The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman ↗. The tidier “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers” is a later smoothing that only turns up in books from the 1990s onward ↗, where it is credited to Truman, Zig Ziglar and John C. Maxwell more or less interchangeably.

Last verified 9 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers” Harry S. Truman, printed in Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed, ed. Monte M. Poen (Little, Brown, 1982), and in The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (1980). The widely shared "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers" is a later paraphrase. · Verbatim: “Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Harry S. Truman estate, with Little, Brown & Co. (Strictly Personal and Confidential, 1982) and Colorado Associated University Press / University of Missouri Press (The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman)). 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 Harry S. Truman — 33rd President of the United States. Theme: "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers". 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 "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers". 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

What Truman actually wrote

Documented wording
“Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.”
Printed in
Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed, ed. Monte M. Poen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982)
Also printed in
The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980)
How the editors label it
Poen heads it “Desk Note [1950s]”; Ferrell’s edition adds the note “[President Truman speaking to a school group, 1960.]”

Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers. Many readers become historians and teachers. They are retiring, timid when publicity is involved, and are among the … Longer passage, trimmed

Reconstructed from the full-text scans of both volumes. Poen’s transcription runs the first two sentences together with a colon and uses an ampersand (“historians & teachers”), the kind of shorthand typical of Truman’s handwriting; Ferrell’s prints full stops. Neither version contains the phrase people quote.

Strictly Personal and Confidential (Little, Brown, 1982) at the Internet Archive

How we verified this

In copyright

The earliest printing we could locate for Truman’s sentence is 1980, in Robert H. Ferrell’s The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, with Monte M. Poen’s Strictly Personal and Confidential following in 1982 — both far too recent for the public domain, so the passage as published is in copyright. Being a president does not change that: these are personal notes and remarks issued by commercial and university presses, not federal work product. The reworded version in circulation has no identifiable author at all.

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 gets the credit, and who should

This is not a fabricated quote so much as a rewritten one. The sentiment is Truman’s; the sentence people share is not, and it has picked up several rival owners along the way.

Harry S. Truman reworded

Truman’s documented sentence reads “Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers,” as printed in both editions of his papers ↗. Even the Truman Library Institute’s own quotations page gives that form, with no source attached ↗.

Zig Ziglar also credited

Brian Tracy’s How the Best Leaders Lead introduces it as “Zig Ziglar said …” ↗, while another book on the same results page runs the identical sentence under Truman’s name.

John C. Maxwell also credited

David Horsager’s The Trust Edge attributes it to Maxwell in both of its editions ↗ — a fair sign the line had floated free of any named source.

anonymous advertising copy older

“Leaders are readers” was a bookshop slogan long before it was a presidential quotation: Quote Investigator prints it in a 1917 Rockford Morning Star advertisement ↗.

Truman’s real sentence — “Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers” — sits inside a longer passage about biography and history, printed in Strictly Personal and Confidential (Little, Brown, 1982) ↗ and in Ferrell’s edition of the autobiography. Quote it that way and you are quoting Truman.

Context

Why this one is so hard to shake

Truman is a magnet for this kind of thing. He is remembered as the plain-spoken president — the desk sign, the short declarative sentence — so any tidy aphorism about self-improvement finds a home under his name. In this case the misattribution has an unusually good alibi: he really did write the thought down, in words that are almost, but not quite, the ones on the poster.

The give-away is the shape of the sentence. Truman’s version is two blunt sentences with a full stop between them — become and must be, verbs that do some work. The version in circulation is a single balanced epigram built on are and are, which reads beautifully and says slightly less. That is what happens to a line after a few decades of being retyped onto slides.

He wrote it as two sentences. The internet rewrote it as one.

The older slogan, and one loose end

The second half of the popular version was already in service before Truman put pen to paper: Quote Investigator reproduces a 1917 Rockford Morning Star advertisement selling military books under the banner “LEADERS ARE READERS”, and traces the related classroom slogan “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader” to a vocational-school student named W. Fusselman, printed in a Newark library journal in 1926.

There is one loose end we could not tie off. Poen’s 1982 volume presents the passage as a written desk note from the 1950s; Ferrell’s edition of the autobiography attaches an editorial note describing Truman speaking to a school group in 1960. Both are careful editors working from Truman’s papers, and we found no way to decide between them, so this page records both rather than picking the more quotable one.

Explore

Filed under

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

Leadership Knowledge Growth

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 Investigator: “Today a Reader; Tomorrow a Leader”quoteinvestigator.com

Traces the reader/leader slogan family — a 1917 “LEADERS ARE READERS” newspaper advertisement and W. Fusselman’s 1926 “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader”. It does not mention Truman anywhere.
Open Library full-text search: “all leaders must be readers”openlibrary.org

Shows Truman’s documented wording inside the scanned text of both The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman and Strictly Personal and Confidential.
Open Library full-text search: “all leaders are readers”openlibrary.org

The popular wording, book by book — all modern titles, credited variously to Truman, Zig Ziglar and John C. Maxwell.
Strictly Personal and Confidential (Little, Brown, 1982)archive.org

Monte M. Poen’s edition of the letters and desk notes Truman never sent, where the passage is printed under the heading “Desk Note [1950s]”.
The Autobiography of Harry S. Trumanarchive.org

Robert H. Ferrell’s edition, originally published in 1980 by Colorado Associated University Press; this scan is the University of Missouri Press printing.
Wikiquote: Harry S. Trumanen.wikiquote.org

The sourced collection of Truman quotations — notable here because the reader/leader line appears in none of its sections.

The reader who became president

Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman

1884–1972 · 33rd President of the United States

Truman was the last U.S. president who never earned a college degree, and he spent a lifetime compensating with books — a habit that began with the four-volume Great Men and Famous Women his mother gave him in 1894 and with a boyhood claim to have worked his way through the Independence public library. He genuinely believed that biography and history were leadership training, and said so often, which is why a sentence he never quite wrote sits so comfortably in his mouth. He took office in April 1945 on Franklin Roosevelt’s death, served until January 1953, and retired to Independence, Missouri, where he kept reading and writing.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Truman’s documented wording

Harry S. Truman, "Desk Note [1950s]," in Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed, ed. Monte M. Poen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982). The same passage is printed in The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980), there carrying the editorial note "[President Truman speaking to a school group, 1960.]" Truman's wording is "Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers"; "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers" is a later paraphrase, located in print no earlier than the 1990s.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/not-all-readers-are-leaders-but-all-leaders-are-readers/

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