The joke is Benchley’s, and it began life as a throwaway line in a spoof book review — his mock-literary appraisal of the New York City telephone directory, printed on page 69 of “Vanity Fair” in February 1920 and reprinted the following year in his first collection, “Of All Things.” His actual sentence was longer and hedged: “There may be said to be two classes of people in the world…” — the crisp modern wording is a later condensation, and nothing connects Groucho Marx to it before a 2002 Usenet post.
“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.” Robert Benchley, "The Most Popular Book of the Month," Vanity Fair, February 1920, p. 69; reprinted in Of All Things (Henry Holt, 1921). Commonly misattributed to Groucho Marx; the short popular wording is a later condensation, not Benchley's own.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Groucho Marx. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Most Popular Book of the Month: An Extremely Literary Review of the Latest Edition of the New York City Telephone Directory
First published
Vanity Fair, February 1920, page 69 — signed “Vanity Fair’s Book Reviewer”
Reprinted
Of All Things (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921), chapter XX
Author
Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
In picking up this new edition of a popular favorite, the reviewer finds himself confronted by a nice problem in literary ethics. The reader must guess what it is.
There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.
Vanity Fair, February 1920, p. 69
The “present volume” under review is the 1,208-page New York City telephone directory. Benchley goes on to complain that the book has too many characters and that its plot “lacks coherence.”
February 1920 — the first appearance. The sentence runs on page 69 of Vanity Fair, inside a mock-solemn review of the New York City telephone directory. We read it in the scanned issue ↗.
1921 — Benchley reprints it under his own name. The piece became chapter XX of Of All Things, his first collection, published by Henry Holt. The passage is verbatim in the Project Gutenberg text ↗.
The joke then goes anonymous.Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ tracks unattributed reuses from 1949 onward and concludes that Benchley should be credited with the 1920 original.
Groucho Marx arrives late. The earliest Groucho credit QI documents is a January 2002 Usenet post; Wikiquote files the line under Benchley ↗, citing Vanity Fair (February 1920).
✓Public domain
Both sources of this line are public domain in the United States. The essay was first published in Vanity Fair in February 1920 and reprinted in Of All Things (Henry Holt, 1921) — well before the 1931 cutoff. Project Gutenberg lists the book as “Public domain in the USA,” and the Internet Archive’s scan of the 1921 first edition is marked NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.
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 else gets the credit
This is an unusually crowded case: the joke lost its author early, and at least five different people have been handed it since. Quote Investigator documents each claim, and none of them predates Benchley’s 1920 printing.
✕
the whole quipGroucho Marx most common today
The earliest Groucho credit Quote Investigator could find is a January 2002 Usenet message ↗ — more than eighty years after Benchley published the line. No film, broadcast or book of his has ever been cited as the source, and Wikiquote’s Groucho Marx page ↗ does not carry it in any section, sourced or otherwise.
A 1975 textbook, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, used the saying as a subsection epigraph and credited the economist Kenneth Boulding — fifty-five years after Vanity Fair, per QI’s chronology ↗.
✕
a “two kinds of people” variantRoss F. Papprill
The Times Book of Quotations (2000) assigned an instance of the saying to a person of this name; QI records the attribution ↗ without any earlier evidence for it.
~
the popular short formBenchley — but with words he never wrote right author, wrong wording
The 1979 compilation 1,001 Logical Laws printed it as “Benchley’s Law of Distinction” in a phrasing that, as QI notes ↗, differed from Benchley’s actual words. The crisp modern version circulating today is likewise a condensation, not a transcription.
✓Robert Benchley wrote it, in Vanity Fair, February 1920, page 69 — and you can read the sentence in the scanned issue itself ↗. He said “may be said to be,” not “there are.”
Context
Why it mattered
The most-quoted joke about categorising people was itself a piece of filler. In February 1920 Vanity Fair ran an “extremely literary review” of the New York City telephone directory — 1,208 pages, five hundred thousand characters, a plot the reviewer found wanting. Benchley, the magazine’s managing editor when he wrote it — he resigned that January, in protest at Dorothy Parker’s firing — worked the bit straight: too many characters, weak narrative, blame the Russian novelists. The two-classes line arrives in the second paragraph as a shrug before he gets to the real business of admiring V. Aagaard, the importer-exporter who has the good fortune to open the book.
What made it travel is the shape rather than the sentiment: a sentence that performs the error it names. That self-cancelling structure is endlessly refillable, which is why the joke has been rebuilt in dozens of forms — “kinds” for “classes,” “dichotomies,” “dichotomize,” and the programmers’ version about the ten kinds of people who do and do not understand binary. Each rebuild sheds a little more of Benchley’s phrasing, until what circulates is a compressed slogan with no author attached — an empty slot that famous names get dropped into.
A joke that performs the error it names travels further than the man who wrote it.
How the wording drifted, decade by decade
Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the erosion clearly. A 1949 New York Times book review used the joke with “kinds” and no attribution; a 1967 education journal ran a “dichotomies” variant, also anonymous; a 1970 book introduced it as the work of “a wit,” and a 1973 careers textbook as something “someone has jokingly remarked.” By then the sentence was public property.
Names then began to attach themselves to the orphan. A 1975 systems-thinking textbook printed it as an epigraph credited to the economist Kenneth Boulding; a 1977 Book of Lists filed it under “Barth’s Distinction”; a 2000 Times quotation dictionary gave it to one Ross F. Papprill. Benchley’s own name resurfaced in 1979 and again in a 1983 Time essay — the 1983 piece quoting his real words, the 1979 one attaching his name to a rewrite.
Quote Investigator documents all of these instances at its investigation of the saying ↗, and concludes that Benchley should be credited with the 1920 original, with later versions probably derived from it directly or indirectly.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1889–1945 · American humorist, critic & actor · Algonquin Round Table
Robert Charles Benchley (1889–1945) was an American humorist, newspaper columnist and actor who became managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1919 and a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table alongside Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. He later wrote prolifically for The New Yorker, serving as its theatre critic from 1929, and worked as a screen comedian in Hollywood. His speciality was the deadpan mock-essay — applying grave critical machinery to something absurd — which is exactly the mode that produced this line.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite the primary source
Robert Benchley [signed “Vanity Fair’s Book Reviewer”], “The Most Popular Book of the Month: An Extremely Literary Review of the Latest Edition of the New York City Telephone Directory,” Vanity Fair (February 1920): 69. Reprinted in Robert C. Benchley, Of All Things (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921), chap. XX, 187.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There Are Two Classes of People in the World; Those Who Divide People into Two Classes and Those Who Do Not’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-two-classes-of-people-in-the-world-those-who/