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Who really said it

The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made

Not Celeste Holm — a line she quoted from an unnamed actor An unnamed theatre actor Quoted by Celeste Holm, April 1962 · never identified
Disputed — Holm is the first person on record repeating it, but she was quoting someone else, and no one has ever identified him. Rights unconfirmed

The joke first reaches print in Leonard Lyons’s syndicated column The Lyons Den on 6 April 1962, where Celeste Holm repeats it as something she had heard another actor say during a panel on where acting was heading. She named no one, and never claimed the line as her own. Quote Investigator ↗ finds no earlier appearance, traces many of the later versions to a 1969 retelling in Life, and concludes the coiner remains unknown — and the familiar wording, “The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” is a later polish of it, not anything Holm is recorded as saying.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made” an unnamed actor, quoted by Celeste Holm in Leonard Lyons's column "The Lyons Den," Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge), 6 April 1962. This is the earliest appearance Quote Investigator has located; the familiar wording "The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made" is a later paraphrase with no identified author. Via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “Honesty. That's the thing in the theater today. Honesty … and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I'll have it made.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Celeste Holm. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of An unnamed theatre actor. Theme: "The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made". 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 "The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made". 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 first appears

Earliest print
The Lyons Den, by Leonard Lyons
Published
6 April 1962 — Morning Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, page 2-A, col. 2
Speaker
An unnamed actor, quoted by Celeste Holm
Popular wording
A later paraphrase — no documented speaker

Honesty. That’s the thing in the theater today. Honesty … and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I’ll have it made. Quoted second-hand

This is the sentence as Quote Investigator ↗ transcribes it from the 1962 column. Holm was speaking on a panel about trends in show business and offered it as something she had heard an actor say — note that it is not the modern wording, and that the “I” in it is not her.

Quote Investigator: The Main Thing Is Honesty. If You Can Fake That, You've Got It Made

How we verified this

  • 6 April 1962 — the earliest appearance located by Quote Investigator ↗: Leonard Lyons’s syndicated column The Lyons Den quotes Celeste Holm quoting an unnamed actor. Lyons wrote the column six days a week from 1934 to 1974, first for the New York Post ↗.
  • 25 April 1969 — an actor’s version appears in Life magazine: “the most important thing for an actor is honesty … And when you learn how to fake that, you’re in.” The issue is on Google Books ↗; the citation is QI’s ↗.
  • 1980 — two different credits land in the same year. George Burns prints a version in The Third Time Around (Putnam), catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗, and Murphy’s Law Book Two hands a ‘sincerity’ variant to Jean Giraudoux without a source — the sole reference Wikiquote can offer for it ↗.
  • 1982 onward — the line is printed as Samuel Goldwyn’s, then as Groucho Marx’s, then simply as an old showbiz proverb. QI ↗ finds no substantive evidence for either man and leaves the coiner anonymous.

The famous wording — “The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made” — has no identified author and no identified first publication, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The oldest documented text is a different sentence: an unnamed actor’s remark as printed in a 1962 newspaper column, an item whose own rights would sit with the column and its syndicate rather than with any speaker.

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

Five names, none of them the author

This line has been handed round for sixty years, and almost every famous name attached to it was attached after the fact. Quote Investigator ↗ dates each hop.

Celeste Holm Repeater, not author

She is the reason the line survives — but the 1962 column has her quoting another actor, unnamed, while discussing trends in acting. QI ↗ presents her as the earliest known relayer and explicitly does not credit her with coining it.

George Burns Popularizer

Burns put a version in his third memoir, The Third Time Around (Putnam, 1980) — “you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” QI ↗ calls that a late date and credits the book with popularising the saying rather than originating it; the memoir is catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗.

Groucho Marx No evidence

The “secret of life is honesty and fair dealing” form turns up credited to Groucho in a 1989 business-ethics column. QI ↗ states that attributions to Marx are not supported by evidence, noting only that he was alive while the expression was circulating.

Samuel Goldwyn No evidence

Printed as a Goldwyn line in a 1982 journal epigraph. Goldwyn is a magnet for invented one-liners, and QI ↗ finds no substantive support for ascribing it to him.

Jean Giraudoux Uncited

A ‘sincerity’ variant was attached to the French playwright in Arthur Bloch’s Murphy’s Law Book Two (1980) with no citation, and Wikiquote still files it under Attributed ↗ on that single reference.

The oldest documented owner of this joke is an actor nobody has ever named. Quote Investigator ↗ found it in print on 6 April 1962 already being quoted second-hand, and concludes the coiner remains anonymous.

Context

Why nobody owns this joke

It is a very hard line to attribute, because it is a very easy line to have overheard. The 1962 column does not present it as a bon mot from a famous actress; it presents Celeste Holm relaying something going around the profession — a working actor’s crack about a fashion in acting that had already curdled into a mannerism. Backstage jokes have no bylines. This one entered print already second-hand, and it never acquired an owner.

What it acquired instead was a series of plausible hosts. Quote Investigator ↗ tracks the drift across two decades: an actor says it about acting in 1969, George Burns puts a version in a memoir in 1980, a paperback of aphorisms hands it to a French playwright the same year, and by the late 1980s it is being printed as Groucho. Each hop swapped ‘honesty’ for ‘sincerity’ or the reverse, and each hop made the wording a little crisper and the source a little vaguer.

Holm was not confessing. She was reporting a joke that was already going around.

How the wording changed on its way to the meme

The 1962 text is loose and conversational — “Honesty. That’s the thing in the theater today. Honesty … and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I’ll have it made.” It is a complaint about a trend, not an epigram.

By 1980 George Burns’s memoir has it tightened to “To be a fine actor, when you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made” — still tied to acting. The meme version drops the theatre entirely and turns it into a general rule about life, which is what lets it be pinned on comedians, movie moguls and playwrights alike.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Character Success

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: The Main Thing Is Honesty. If You Can Fake That, You've Got It Madequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: dated citations from 1962 to 2008, the Celeste Holm origin, and the conclusion that the coiner is anonymous and the Marx and Goldwyn credits unsupported.
Celeste Holmen.wikipedia.org

Biography confirming her dates (29 April 1917 – 15 July 2012), her Oscar for Gentleman's Agreement and her Broadway and television career.
Leonard Lyonsen.wikipedia.org

Background on the columnist who printed the line: 'The Lyons Den' ran in the New York Post and in syndication from 1934 to 1974.
Jean Giraudoux — Attributeden.wikiquote.org

Files the 'secret of success is sincerity' variant under Attributed, citing only Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law Book Two (1980), p. 47.
The Third Time Around by George Burns (1980)archive.org

Catalogue record for the Putnam 1980 memoir that Quote Investigator credits with popularising the saying.
Life, 25 April 1969books.google.com

The Life issue cited by Quote Investigator for the 1969 actor's version of the remark.

The name on the quote

About Celeste Holm

Celeste Holm

1917–2012 · American stage, film and television actress

Celeste Holm won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and was nominated twice more, for Come to the Stable and All About Eve; on Broadway she originated Ado Annie in Oklahoma! in 1943, and she later carried her own television series. Her connection to this quotation is real but indirect: in April 1962 she was the first person on record to repeat it in public, talking about the vogues in acting. She credited it to another actor and did not name him — which is exactly why the line has floated free of an author ever since, collecting famous names as it went.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Leonard Lyons, “The Lyons Den,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), April 6, 1962, page 2-A, col. 2 — the earliest appearance located by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: The Main Thing Is Honesty. If You Can Fake That, You’ve Got It Made,” December 5, 2011.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Main Thing Is Honesty. If You Can Fake That, You've Got It Made’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-main-thing-is-honesty-if-you-can-fake-that-youve-got-it/

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