When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times.Attributed to Mark Twain in epigraph to Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (2016)
But it probably wasn't his clever line.
In 2012 Quote Investigator found an Atlantic Monthly article in 1886 attributing a similar quip to King Ludwig II, describing Bavaria. And other people mocked Dresden, the Netherlands, Mecklenburg, and Ireland. People credited Heinrich Heine, Otto von Bismarck, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw. Seems like another one of the many good lines we can credit to Anonymous.
