When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times
Not George Bernard Shaw — a travelling joke with no known authorUnknown (an anonymous German saying)In English print by October 1886 · originally about Bavaria, not Cincinnati
Quote Investigator ↗ traces this quip to an anonymous German saying about Bavaria, printed in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1886 — long before anyone put Cincinnati, Mark Twain or Shaw in it. Shaw’s name is attached to only one variant, and only in 1998, when President Clinton told a Limerick audience ↗ that Shaw “hoped to be in Ireland on the day the world ended” — forty-eight years after Shaw died.
“When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times” Not George Bernard Shaw. "When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati — it is always ten years behind the times" is a travelling joke with no known author. Quote Investigator traces it to an anonymous German saying printed in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1886, where the place was Bavaria and the lag was fifty years. Cincinnati and Mark Twain appear only in the late 1970s; Shaw's name is attached to an Ireland version only in 1998, when President Clinton quoted it in a speech at Limerick — forty-eight years after Shaw died. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to George Bernard Shaw. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of change and time. Theme: "When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times". 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 "When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times". 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 joke actually comes from
Earliest known printing
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1886
What it actually said
Bavaria — the end of the world would arrive there “fifty years later than in any other country”
Cincinnati version
First documented 1977–79, credited to Mark Twain, who died in 1910
Shaw version
Ireland, 50 years — the one Shaw citation on record is a 1998 speech by President Clinton
It is a common saying in Germany that Bavaria will be the best place to emigrate to at the approaching end of the world, since that event, like everything else, will be sure to come off there fifty years later than in any other country. The Bavarians will be behind the times even as to the point when time shall be no more, and will enter as laggards upon the eternal life.
1886 · Bavaria, not Cincinnati
E. P. Evans, “A Mad Monarch,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1886 — the article begins on page 449 and this passage falls on page 452 — as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗. No Cincinnati, no ten years, and no named author: Evans presents it simply as a common saying.
1886 — the oldest known form is anonymous and German. The Atlantic Monthly reports a common German saying that Bavaria is the place to be when the world ends, because the event will arrive there fifty years later than anywhere else (Quote Investigator ↗). A version in German almost certainly predates it.
1963–1976 — the joke starts collecting famous names as it moves around the map: Heinrich Heine and Holland from 1963, Otto von Bismarck and Mecklenburg in 1969, James Boswell and the Netherlands in a 1976 New York Times piece. Each name was attached long after the man had died (chronology ↗).
1977–1979 — Cincinnati and Mark Twain appear for the first time, in a University of Houston keynote address and then in a scholarly article that flags the line “probably apocryphal” in the same sentence it prints it. The University of Cincinnati’s own archivist is blunter: “Twain never said it” ↗.
1998 — Shaw’s name finally enters, and not about Cincinnati at all. Speaking in Limerick, President Clinton says Shaw “hoped to be in Ireland on the day the world ended” because the Irish ran fifty years behind (American Presidency Project ↗). Will Rogers is credited by 2004.
The Cincinnati wording cannot be tied to any identified work. Its earliest known printings — a conference volume published in 1978 and a 1979 journal article — are modern, in-copyright publications, and neither presents itself as quoting a document. The 1886 Atlantic Monthly ancestor is long out of copyright, but it is a different sentence, about Bavaria, by an unnamed originator, so quotle.info asserts no public-domain status for the line as it circulates today.
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
Six famous names, none of them supported
This is a joke that swaps its target city and its famous author roughly every decade. At least six names have been attached to it, and Quote Investigator ↗ finds no compelling evidence for any of them.
✕
The Shaw versionGeorge Bernard Shaw Ireland · 50 years
The German versionsHeinrich Heine and Otto von Bismarck Holland · Mecklenburg
Heine is the first famous name ever attached, in a 1963 broadcasting review that has him sending everyone to Holland, where things happen fifty years late; Heine had died in 1856. Bismarck gets Mecklenburg in a 1969 periodical, with the lag shrunk to two years, and again in a 1975 New York Times letter with fifty (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
Also creditedJames Boswell and Will Rogers 1976 · 2004
A 1976 New York Times story hands the Netherlands version to Boswell; by 2004 a book of one-liners has the Cincinnati version under Will Rogers’s name. Both are late arrivals in a chain that runs back to 1886 ↗.
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who made the joke. It was already circulating anonymously in Germany before 1886, and every famous name on it — Shaw included — was added long afterwards, usually decades after the supposed speaker had died (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
A joke that keeps moving house
Some quotations are stolen; this one is more like a rental property. The structure never changes — when the world ends, go to X, because everything arrives there N years late — while the city, the lag and the wit who supposedly said it are all swapped out to suit whoever is telling it. Bavaria and fifty years in 1886. Dresden in 1910. Holland under Heine’s name from the 1960s. Mecklenburg under Bismarck’s, once with the lag cut to a mere two years. Then Cincinnati and ten years, under Mark Twain’s.
That churn is exactly what makes the attribution worthless. A genuine quotation has a fixed wording and a document behind it. This one has neither: the wording is whatever the joke needs, and the earliest witness, an 1886 magazine article, explicitly presents it as something everybody in Germany already says. Shaw’s name arrived at the very end of the chain, in a 1998 political speech, applied to a version about Ireland that has nothing to do with Cincinnati at all.
Every generation gives the joke a new city and a new author.
Why Cincinnati, and why Twain?
Twain really did have a Cincinnati connection — he worked in the city as a young printer in the 1850s, which is the hook local retellings hang the quip on. But a plausible biography is not evidence. The line surfaces more than sixty years after his death, and the scholar who first printed it in an academic journal in 1979 flagged it as probably apocryphal on the spot.
The wording on this page, with “ten years behind the times,” matches that 1979 journal transcription. The version that circulates most widely online says twenty years instead. Both are modern, and neither can be traced to anything Twain wrote.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic and Nobel laureate
Born in Dublin in 1856 and dead in Hertfordshire in 1950, Shaw wrote more than sixty plays and worked for years as a theatre and music critic, political activist and professional provocateur. He took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and later became the first person to hold both a Nobel and an Academy Award. He was quotable enough that stray lines drift toward him by gravity — but this one reached him only in 1998, forty-eight years after his death, and in a form about Ireland rather than Cincinnati.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Chicago
Earliest documented form: E. P. Evans, “A Mad Monarch,” The Atlantic Monthly 58, no. 348 (October 1886): 449, quotation at 452. Chronology and verdict from “Quote Origin: When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times,” Quote Investigator, March 20, 2012.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘When the End of the World Comes, I Want To Be in Cincinnati. It Is Always Ten Years Behind the Times’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/when-the-end-of-the-world-comes-i-want-to-be-in-cincinnati/