The Iron Chancellor is often credited with the paradoxical statement that people easily believe lies, but are surprised by truthful statements. We checked whether this attribution is correct.

The verifiable statement is attributed to Bismarck by the largest sites that collect quotes from famous people: City.net, "Quotes.info", Tsitaty.ru, "Great words"and others. With reference to the German statesman, the phrase is also quoted by the media, including "Komsomolskaya Pravda" And "Kommersant".

Our colleagues from The Quote Investigator project discoveredthat the earliest use of the phrase dates from the late 19th century. In 1885, the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, which was published in New York state, published a note about a strange transaction made by a partner of financial speculator Jay Gould. He sold a large number of shares of Western Union - this should have led to a significant drop in price, but the quotes fell very little. The author of that publication wrote: “The whole street (Wall Street - editor's note) was puzzled by what happened. By all accounts, the transactions were "washing" and Gould was simply buying shares with one hand and selling with the other. Others felt that Gould was acting on Bismarck's principle: "When you have to deceive the world, tell the truth."

The Quote Investigator emphasizes that they were unable to find the original of this statement by Bismarck in German (our search was also unsuccessful). Fact checkers also draw attention to the fact that in an American newspaper the statement is called the “Bismarck principle,” that is, we can talk about a description of the Chancellor’s activities, which for some reason was placed in quotation marks. In the same 1885, other small American newspapers also published the quote (in them it was also called the “Bismarck principle”).

Despite the not the most unambiguous formulation, the phrase very quickly turned from “Bismarck’s principle” into his quote. Already in 1887 she was in this capacity hit into the collection “Parables, sayings and phrases for all ages” by Robert Christie, two years later mentioned in his book with various wisdoms Charles Spurgeon.

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