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Who really said it

We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!

Not Yogi’s line — credited to Buddy Blattner, 1947 Buddy Blattner 1920–2009 · New York Giants infielder, world table-tennis champion, later a sportscaster
Disputed In copyright

The joke was already running in a national magazine in 1947: Collier’s Weekly published it on 11 October 1947 as an airline-pilot gag in a George Lichty cartoon, and in February 1948 the magazine reprinted the panel and credited the caption to New York Giants infielder Buddy Blattner. Berra did claim the line as his own in The Yogi Book (1998), dating it to a 1972 drive to the Hall of Fame — but it had been attached to him in print since 1963, and Quote Investigator ↗ concludes he was “employing a pre-existing punchline.”

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!” popularly Yogi Berra, who printed it in The Yogi Book (Workman, 1998, p. 51) as something he said on a 1972 drive to the Baseball Hall of Fame. But the gag was already in print: a George Lichty cartoon in Collier's Weekly, 11 October 1947, had an airline pilot tell his passengers "We're still lost, but we're making very good time!", and in February 1948 Collier's credited the caption to New York Giants infielder Buddy Blattner. A sports column had pinned a version on Berra by October 1963. Chronology: Quote Investigator, 11 July 2012.

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company (Collier’s Weekly, 1947–48); Workman Publishing and the estate of Yogi Berra (The Yogi Book, 1998)). 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 Buddy Blattner — Ballplayer, world table-tennis champion, sportscaster. Theme: "We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!". 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 "We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!". 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 comes from

Earliest known appearance
Collier’s Weekly, 11 October 1947, p. 61 — cartoon by George Lichty
Caption credited to
Buddy Blattner, in the Collier’s reprint of 14 February 1948, p. 8
Attached to Berra by
Merle Jones’s sports column, Southern Illinoisan, 28 October 1963
Berra’s own account
The Yogi Book (Workman Publishing, 1998), p. 51

Collier’s Weekly, 11 October 1947 — a George Lichty cartoon panel showing a uniformed airline pilot addressing his passengers:
“We’re still lost, but we’re making very good time!” 1947 · the airline-pilot version

Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from Collier’s Weekly, 11 October 1947, p. 61. Four months later Collier’s reprinted the panel and credited the caption not to the cartoonist but to ballplayer Buddy Blattner. The car, the map and Yogi Berra all arrive later.

Quote Investigator: the full 1947 to 1998 chronology

Paper trail

  • 11 October 1947 — Collier’s Weekly runs a George Lichty cartoon of an airline pilot telling his passengers “We’re still lost, but we’re making very good time!” This is the earliest appearance known to Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 14 February 1948 — Collier’s reprints the panel and names the writer: the gag “came from the fertile brain of Buddy Blattner, of the New York Giants, who sold it to Collier’s, who farmed it to Lichty.” Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1959–1962 — the gag keeps moving: a North Carolina paper gives it to a pilot with a broken compass in 1959, Joe McCarthy’s humour column “In One Ear” in The American Weekly of 14 August 1960 has it on a Hawaii-bound airliner, and a 1962 “Laughing Matter” cartoon finally puts it in a car, spoken by a woman holding a map. Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1963, then 1998 — Merle Jones pins a Yogi-and-Garagiola version on Berra in the Southern Illinoisan of 28 October 1963; thirty-five years on, Berra prints it in The Yogi Book (Workman, 1998), p. 51, as something he said driving to the Hall of Fame in 1972. The book is borrowable at the Internet Archive ↗, and QI verified the page on paper.
In copyright

No form of this line is documented before 1947, so nothing here falls in the pre-1931 US public-domain window. The earliest known appearance is a cartoon caption in Collier’s Weekly of 11 October 1947, and the exact wording most people quote comes from The Yogi Book (Workman Publishing, 1998) — a plainly in-copyright modern book. Treat the sentence as in-copyright and use it as a short attributed quotation.

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

Why everyone says Yogi

This is one of the most-repeated Yogi-isms, and it is the rare case where Berra himself claimed the line. But the joke was already in a national magazine when he was in his second season with the Yankees, and it reached him the way stock gags always do — through a sports column.

Yogi Berra, as the line’s author Repeated as his own coinage

Quote sites run it flat under his name. AZQuotes ↗ credits it to Berra and sources it to The Yogi Book (1998), with nothing to indicate the gag had been in print for half a century by then.

An anonymous airline pilot Collier’s, 11 October 1947

A George Lichty cartoon panel showed a uniformed pilot telling his passengers “We’re still lost, but we’re making very good time!” This is the earliest appearance known to Quote Investigator ↗.

Buddy Blattner Named in print, February 1948

When Collier’s reprinted the panel on 14 February 1948, it added that the gag “came from the fertile brain of Buddy Blattner, of the New York Giants, who sold it to Collier’s, who farmed it to Lichty.” Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗

A 1963 sports column Predates Berra’s own date

Merle Jones ran a Yogi-and-Garagiola car version in the Southern Illinoisan on 28 October 1963 — which QI notes is “almost a decade before the date that Berra himself gave” for saying it. Quote Investigator ↗

It is a stock 1940s gag: first documented in Collier’s Weekly on 11 October 1947 and credited there to ballplayer Buddy Blattner. Yogi Berra told a version of it and printed it as his own in 1998 — but, as Quote Investigator ↗ puts it, he was “employing a pre-existing punchline.”

Context

How a cockpit joke became a Yogi-ism

Yogi Berra is a quote magnet: lines drift toward him because they sound like something he would say, and because his name makes the joke land. His own 1998 book is titled I really didn’t say everything I said! — an admission, from the source, that the corpus had outgrown the man. This line is the unusual case where Berra claimed one back, printing it as something he said on a 1972 drive to the Baseball Hall of Fame with his wife Carmen and their three sons.

The trouble is that the joke was already old. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to a George Lichty cartoon in Collier’s Weekly of 11 October 1947, in which an airline pilot tells his passengers they are still lost but making very good time — and to a February 1948 reprint where the magazine named Buddy Blattner as the caption’s author. By 1962 the setting had moved from cockpit to car, and by October 1963 a sports column had put the line in Yogi’s mouth, which QI notes is “almost a decade before the date that Berra himself gave.”

The gag, incidentally, came from the fertile brain of Buddy Blattner, of the New York Giants, who sold it to Collier’s, who farmed it to Lichty.

Two Garagiola versions that don’t match

Joe Garagiola turns up in two different tellings and they disagree. In the 1963 Southern Illinoisan column, Yogi has just bought his first car in St. Louis and picks Joe up for a drive; Joe says “Yogi, you’re lost,” and Yogi answers “Yeah, I know it, but were making good time.” Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗

In the October 1971 Baseball Digest, Garagiola is instead visiting Berra in New Jersey, notices they have passed the same church three times and asks “We’re lost, huh?” — to which Yogi replies “But we’re making good time, ain’t we?” Different state, different car, different decade. Quote Investigator ↗

Berra’s own 1998 account has neither Garagiola nor a church: he is driving his family to Cooperstown in 1972, and the line is aimed at Carmen — “Carmen was giving me a hard time, so I gave it back.” Three incompatible settings for one punchline is the signature of a floating joke, not a remembered remark. Quote Investigator ↗

Explore

Filed under

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

Purpose Work Doubt

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: We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the full dated chronology from the 1947 Collier's cartoon to The Yogi Book, and QI's conclusion that Berra used a pre-existing punchline.
The Yogi Book: I really didn't say everything I said!archive.org

Berra's own 1998 collection (Workman, 127 pp.), borrowable. QI verified the line on p. 51 from a paper copy.
Buddy Blattneren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man Collier's credited with the caption: table-tennis world champion, Giants infielder, then broadcaster.
Buddy Blattner — SABR BioProjectsabr.org

Long-form Society for American Baseball Research biography covering his playing career and decades in the booth.
Yogi Berraen.wikipedia.org

Life dates, Yankees career and 1972 Hall of Fame induction for the man the line is usually pinned on.
Yogi Berra — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's Berra page, with sourced, Disputed and Misattributed sections — notably, this line appears in none of them.

The man Collier’s credited

Who was Buddy Blattner?

Buddy Blattner

1920–2009 · Ballplayer, world table-tennis champion, sportscaster

Robert Garnett ‘Buddy’ Blattner won world table-tennis doubles titles in 1936 and 1937 before playing five major-league seasons for the Cardinals, Giants and Phillies, then spent a quarter-century in the broadcast booth — calling Game of the Week alongside Dizzy Dean and later doing the Angels and the Royals. He is not remembered as a comedy writer, which is part of why this credit evaporated: when Collier’s reprinted the cartoon in February 1948, it noted that the gag had been sold to the magazine by Blattner, then a New York Giants infielder, and farmed out to the cartoonist. The punchline outlived the credit by about eighty years.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

Earliest known appearance per Quote Investigator: Collier’s Weekly, 11 October 1947, 61 (cartoon by George Lichty); caption credited to Buddy Blattner in Collier’s Weekly, 14 February 1948, 8. Berra’s own account: Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! (New York: Workman Publishing, 1998), 51. Chronology: “Quote Origin: We’re Lost, But We’re Making Good Time!” Quote Investigator, 11 July 2012.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We're Lost, But We're Making Good Time!’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/were-lost-but-were-making-good-time/

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