Rogers wrote the line word for word in his syndicated weekly column in April 1923 and reprinted it on page 72 of his own book The Illiterate Digest (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924), in the chapter “Helping the Girls with Their Income Taxes.” The Project Gutenberg transcription ↗ of that edition carries the sentence with the page‑72 marker printed mid‑sentence, exactly where Quote Investigator ↗ places it.
“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has” Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924), 72; first printed in his syndicated newspaper column, April 1923. · Verbatim: “The Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than Golf has. Even when you make one out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a Crook or a Martyr.”
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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has". 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
Where the line actually appears
Work
The Illiterate Digest
Chapter
“Helping the Girls with Their Income Taxes” — begins on page 69; the quote falls on page 72
Publication
New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924
Earliest printing located
Rogers’s syndicated column, The Chattanooga News, 7 April 1923, Magazine Section, page 5
Now, as I say, these Girls all wanted to do what was right as they could afford to but this Income Tax has not acted that way with the Men. The Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than Golf has.
Even when you make one out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a Crook or a Martyr.
Of course, people are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting Lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their Guide.
The Illiterate Digest, p. 72
Rogers’s own capitalization, as set in the 1924 Boni edition. The chapter’s premise is that he has been helping the girls in the Follies make out their returns — the “Liars” line is the punchline he turns on the men.
7 April 1923 — the earliest printing Quote Investigator ↗ locates is The Chattanooga News, Magazine Section, page 5, which ran Rogers’s column under a headline built from the joke itself — QI’s citation records the article title as Income Tax Has Made More Liars Out of the American People Than Golf: Helping Girls With Their Income Tax.
1924 — Rogers collected the column in his own book The Illiterate Digest. The sentence sits on page 72 of the Albert & Charles Boni edition, and the Project Gutenberg transcription ↗ prints its page‑72 marker in the middle of that very sentence.
1 November 1924 — Rogers ran the gag again in his column, in The Richmond Palladium of Richmond, Indiana, this time with a different tag about issuing a new kind of tax every year or two, as QI documents ↗.
1949 onward —Collier’s Weekly quoted the line in February 1949 as something Rogers used to say; the same year Evan Esar’s Dictionary of Humorous Quotations printed gold for golf, which QI calls probably a misprint ↗.
✓Public domain
The Illiterate Digest was published in New York by Albert & Charles Boni in 1924, and the column it reprints ran in newspapers in April 1923 — both well before the 1931 threshold, so the text is in the public domain in the United States. Project Gutenberg ↗ lists the book as public domain in the USA and hosts the complete text.
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
The attribution is sound — this one really is Rogers, and the popular wording is essentially what he printed. What travels badly is the phrasing: the sentence gets trimmed, reshuffled, and on one occasion typeset with the wrong word entirely.
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Wording“made liars out of more people than golf” Paraphrase
A looser form circulates in which the sentence is reshuffled and the American people disappears — the version quoted in the reader question that opens Quote Investigator’s inquiry ↗ runs: the income tax has made liars out of more people than golf. Rogers’s printed line keeps the American people and ends with than Golf has.
✕
One wordEvan Esar, The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1949) Misprint
Esar’s collection printed the quip with gold where Rogers wrote golf, which kills the joke outright. Quote Investigator ↗ judges it probably a misprint rather than a genuine variant.
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CompressionThe Saturday Review, 1962 Trimmed
A sidebar of Rogers sayings published in August 1962 ran the line stripped to its second half, with the subject supplied in a parenthesis rather than inside Rogers’s own sentence — one visible step in how the quote loosened over the decades, per QI’s chronology ↗.
✓The bottom line: Will Rogers wrote it, and the wording you have probably seen is very close to his own — you can read the sentence in place on page 72 of the 1924 edition ↗. Only the drift — a dropped phrase here, a gold for a golf there — belongs to somebody else.
Context
Why it landed
When Rogers wrote this, the federal income tax was barely a decade old — the Sixteenth Amendment ↗ was ratified in February 1913 — and filing season was still a novel national ordeal. The column carrying the joke is not a tax rant at all: it is a comic set piece about Rogers helping the girls in the Follies fill out their returns, working out whether a two‑thousand‑dollar bracelet counts as rent.
The famous sentence arrives as a turn. After pages of insisting the girls were scrupulously honest, Rogers pivots to the men — and the gag lands because every reader in 1923 already knew that golfers cheat at arithmetic. That compression is what made it durable: one clause, two American institutions, no argument required.
Even when you make one out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a Crook or a Martyr.
Rogers recycled his best lines
Writing to deadline for a weekly syndicated column — and from 1926 a daily one as well — Rogers reused a good joke as a matter of course. Quote Investigator records him deploying this one again in a column printed in The Richmond Palladium on 1 November 1924, this time with a fresh tag about issuing a new kind of tax every year or two so nobody learns how to beat it.
The reuse is part of why the line is so firmly his: it is not a single stray sentence in one newspaper, but a gag he printed in his column, ran again the following year, and then collected under his own name in a book.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1879–1935 · American humorist, actor and syndicated newspaper columnist
Born near Oologah in Indian Territory in 1879, Rogers went from a rope‑twirling vaudeville act to being the most quoted man in America — vaudeville performer, film actor, and above all a humorous social commentator on whatever was in the day’s news. From 1922 until his death he wrote a weekly newspaper column syndicated by The New York Times, adding a short daily column in 1926; the tax jokes still circulating under his name come out of that enormous, deadline‑driven output. He was killed in an airplane crash on Alaska’s North Slope on 15 August 1935.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Will Rogers, “Helping the Girls with Their Income Taxes,” in The Illiterate Digest (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924), 72. Earliest newspaper printing located by Quote Investigator: The Chattanooga News (Chattanooga, TN), April 7, 1923, Magazine Section, 5.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-income-tax-has-made-more-liars-out-of-the-american/