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Who really said it

There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

Not Artemus Ward — an anonymous swindlers’ adage Anonymous Earliest ‘sucker’ printing: 2 January 1879 · Chicago
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is the youngest member of a family of anonymous sayings that ran through nineteenth-century print — “a fool born every minute” (1806), “a flat born every minute” (1835) — before the ‘sucker’ wording surfaced, credited to nobody, in a Chicago newspaper on 2 January 1879. The first known credit to Artemus Ward is a small-town New York weekly of 6 October 1888, twenty-one years after his death, and the phrase appears nowhere in his collected works.

Last verified 8 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There's a Sucker Born Every Minute” not Artemus Ward. An anonymous gamblers' adage; the earliest known 'sucker' printing is "Gambling in Chicago," The Inter-Ocean (Chicago), 2 January 1879, where it is credited only to an unnamed "old-timer." The credit to Artemus Ward first appears in The Nunda News, 6 October 1888 — twenty-one years after his death — and the line occurs nowhere in his collected works. Chronology: Quote Investigator. quotle.info

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Provenance

Where the line actually shows up

Earliest ‘sucker’ printing
The Inter-Ocean, Chicago
Article and date
“Gambling in Chicago,” 2 January 1879, page 5, column 2
Credited to
An anonymous “old-timer” — the saying already sits inside quotation marks
First Artemus Ward credit
“Geneseo Suckers,” The Nunda News (Nunda, New York), 6 October 1888 — twenty-one years after Ward’s death

… in the season they make a bit on base ball, or on the races, and then, you know, ‘there’s a sucker born every minute,’ and rigid city legislation drives the hard-up gambler, who would be a decent one of the kind, to turn skin-dealer and sure-thing player. 1879 · The Inter-Ocean, Chicago

Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from The Inter-Ocean of 2 January 1879. The single quotation marks around the saying are the newspaper’s own — a sign it was already circulating as gamblers’ slang, with no author attached to it.

Quote Investigator: Quote Origin: There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

How we know

  • The saying has a long anonymous pedigree. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it from “that there vash von fool born every minute” in The European Magazine and London Review of January 1806, through “there is a flat born every minute” in Bell’s Life in London in 1835, to the first ‘sucker’ instance in The Inter-Ocean of 2 January 1879 — every one of them unattributed.
  • The Artemus Ward credit is dated and traceable. QI ↗ found it in “Geneseo Suckers,” The Nunda News of 6 October 1888, which closes a report on a jewellery swindle by telling the victims to console themselves with “that famous expression of Artemus Ward’s that ‘there is a sucker born every minute.’” Ward had been dead since March 1867.
  • Ward’s own writing does not contain it. A full-text search of The Complete Works of Artemus Ward ↗ — the seven-part collected edition, essays through the Panorama — returns no instance of “sucker,” “born every minute” or “fool born.” Neither does Don C. Seitz’s 1919 biography and bibliography ↗ of him.
  • Barnum inherited the line last, not first. QI’s earliest Barnum linkage ↗ is an October 1890 Chicago clothing-store advertisement using the word “fool”; the ‘sucker’ wording was not attached to him until a July 1892 newspaper item, after his death in 1891.
Public domain

Every documented appearance of this saying is a nineteenth-century one — 1806 through 1892 — and all of it is long out of copyright in the United States. There is also no author to hold rights in it: the phrase entered print as anonymous gamblers’ slang, and the newspapers that carried it were quoting a proverb, not coining a 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

Five owners, none of them the author

This line keeps changing hands. Quote Investigator’s chronology shows it passing from anonymous swindlers to a series of famous names — not one of whom can be shown to have coined it.

Artemus Ward 1888

Browne died on 6 March 1867. The first known ascription to him comes twenty-one years later, in a jewellery-swindle report in The Nunda News of 6 October 1888 ↗, which tells the victims they can console themselves with “that famous expression of Artemus Ward’s.” The phrase is in none of his books.

P. T. Barnum Most common

Quote Investigator ↗ found no persuasive evidence Barnum spoke or wrote it: the earliest link is an October 1890 Chicago clothing-store advertisement using “fool,” and the ‘sucker’ wording only reached him in July 1892, after his death in 1891. Researcher Ralph Keyes is quoted there saying no modern historian “takes seriously the routine attribution of this slogan to P. T. Barnum.”

Joseph ‘Hungry Joe’ Lewis 1885

A 41-page pamphlet, The Life of Hungry Joe: King of the Bunco Men, says it was always a saying with Joe that there was a sucker born every minute ↗ — six years after the phrase was already in print with no owner.

Mike McDonald 1889

A Rockford, Illinois paper of 5 September 1889 called it “Mike McDonald’s celebrated maxim” ↗, a decade after the anonymous Chicago printing.

David Hannum Secondary sources only

Wikiquote’s Misattributed section ↗ repeats R. J. Brown’s claim that the banker David Hannum said it of the crowds paying to see Barnum’s plaster replica of the Cardiff Giant. Quote Investigator notes that Hannum — along with George Hull, Joseph Bessimer and Adam Forepaugh — appears only in secondary and tertiary sources, with no dated primary citation behind it.

The honest answer is that nobody owns it. As Quote Investigator ↗ concludes, both the “fool” and “sucker” versions began with anonymous attributions and were only later reassigned to prominent people — and of all those names, only Barnum’s stuck.

Context

A trade proverb that kept changing owners

Nineteenth-century America ran on confidence games, and the trade had its own proverbs. This is one of them: a working swindler’s observation about the reliable supply of marks, printed in gambling columns and police reports for decades before anyone thought to put a name on it. When The Inter-Ocean ran it in January 1879 the paper put it in quotation marks and hung it on an unnamed “old-timer” — the standard signal that a phrase is already common property.

What happened next is the ordinary life-cycle of a good anonymous saying: it gets attached to whoever is famous for the thing it describes. Within a handful of years the same sentence was credited to a bunco man (1885), to a humorist twenty-one years dead (1888), and to a Chicago gambling boss (1889) — before the greatest showman in America absorbed it for good in 1890 and never gave it back.

The phrase was already inside quotation marks in 1879. The newspaper was repeating slang, not quoting a man.

How the wording drifted, year by year

1806 — “there vash von fool born every minute,” in an essay in The European Magazine and London Review, put in the mouth of a fictitious dealer in damaged goods.

1826 — “a new fool is born every day,” quoted as an existing principle in The New-York Evening Post.

1835 — “there is a flat born every minute,” in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle; “flat” was the period slang for a dupe.

1877 — “there is a fool born every hour,” ascribed to an unnamed London sharper.

1879 — “there’s a sucker born every minute”: the first ‘sucker’ version, anonymous, in The Inter-Ocean of Chicago.

1885–1892 — the same sentence is handed in turn to Hungry Joe Lewis, Artemus Ward, Mike McDonald and finally P. T. Barnum.

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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: There's a Sucker Born Every Minutequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor research. Garson O'Toole's full chronology from 1806 to 1892, with every citation transcribed and footnoted — including the 1888 Nunda News item that first credits Artemus Ward.
There's a sucker born every minuteen.wikipedia.org

Encyclopedia overview of the attribution fight: no evidence Barnum said it, the David Hannum / Cardiff Giant theory, and the Joseph 'Paper Collar Joe' Bessimer suggestion.
P. T. Barnum — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote files the line under Misattributed on Barnum's page and passes on R. J. Brown's argument that it began with the banker David Hannum.
The Complete Works of Artemus Wardwww.gutenberg.org

The full seven-part collected edition, free and searchable. Search it yourself: 'sucker' and 'born every minute' return nothing.
Seitz, Artemus Ward: A Biography and Bibliography (1919)archive.org

Don C. Seitz's 408-page life and bibliography of Browne, published by Harper. It catalogues his writings exhaustively and never mentions this saying.
Charles Farrar Browneen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man behind Artemus Ward — the dates that matter here: born 26 April 1834, died of tuberculosis 6 March 1867 at Southampton, England.

The name it gets pinned on

Artemus Ward

Artemus Ward

1834–1867 · American humorist and lecturer, pen name of Charles Farrar Browne

Charles Farrar Browne (1834–1867) wrote and performed as Artemus Ward, the deadpan travelling-showman persona whose misspelled letters and sold-out lectures made him one of the most popular American humorists of the 1860s. He befriended Mark Twain in Virginia City, Nevada, and recommended him to New York editors. Browne moved to England in 1866 and died of tuberculosis at Southampton on 6 March 1867; his remains were returned to Waterford, Maine the following year. Every book bearing his name was published in his lifetime or shortly after — and none of them contains this sentence.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented printing

“Gambling in Chicago,” The Inter-Ocean (Chicago), January 2, 1879, p. 5, col. 2 — the earliest instance using the word “sucker,” located by Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute,” Quote Investigator, April 11, 2014. Earliest credit to Artemus Ward: “Geneseo Suckers,” The Nunda News (Nunda, N.Y.), October 6, 1888, p. 3, col. 4.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There's a Sucker Born Every Minute’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/theres-a-sucker-born-every-minute/

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