The Iron Chancellor is often attributed to a paradoxical statement that people easily believe lies, but are surprised at true statements. We checked whether this attribution is correct.

The verified statement is attributed to the Bismarck by the largest sites that collect quotes of famous people: Citaty.net, "Quotes.info" Tsitaty.ru, "Great words"And others. With reference to a German statesman, the media also leads the phrase, including "Komsomolskaya Pravda" And "Kommersant".

Our colleagues from the project The Quote Investigator discoveredThe earliest use of this phrase dates from the end of the 19th century. In 1885, in the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, which was published in New York, a note appeared on a strange transaction made by the partner of the financial speculator Jay Gulda. He sold a large number of Western Union shares - this was supposed to lead to a significant drop in prices, but the quotes decreased very slightly. The author of that publication wrote: “The whole street (Wall Street.-Approx. Ed.) Was puzzled by what happened. In the general opinion, the transactions were “flushing” and Gold simply bought shares with one hand and sold the other. Others considered that Gold acted on the principle of Bismarck: "When you need to deceive the world, tell the truth."

The Quote Investigator emphasizes that they could not find the original of this statement by Bismarck in German (our searches were also unsuccessful). The fact also draw attention to the fact that in the American newspaper the statement is called the “Bismarck principle”, that is, we can talk about the characterization of the activities of the chancellor, which for some reason was placed in quotation marks. In the same 1885, other small American newspapers published a quote (in them it was also called the “Bismarck principle”).

Despite not the most unambiguous formulation, very quickly the phrase turned from the “Bismarck principle” into his quote. Already in 1887, she in that capacity I got it In the collection “Proverbs, sayings and phrases for all ages” Robert Christie, two years later, her He mentioned In his book with various wisdoms, Charles Pereong.

A similar phrase (without reference to German politics) already at the beginning of the 20th century was used by the playwright Bernard Shaw. In the play "Another Island of John Bull" one of the characters speaks: “My way to joke is to tell the truth. This is the funniest joke in the world! "