You’ve probably heard this old saying used by observers of Congress, state legislatures, and other government bodies:
“Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”
It’s commonly attributed to Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the German statesman known as “The Iron Chancellor.”
However, there’s no reliable evidence that Bismarck ever said it.
Several quotation researchers I admire have traced the analogy to American poet and humorist John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887).
Fred Shapiro found it credited to Saxe in the Daily Cleveland Herald of March 29, 1869.
Ralph Keyes cited an April 1869 appearance credited to Saxe.
Garson O’Toole later found a slightly earlier attribution to Saxe in the University of Michigan’s University Chronicle of March 27, 1869. The Chronicle quoted Saxe as saying:
“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
In a post on his website, language sleuth Barry Popik documented one other similar version from around the same time.
Popik found an article published in the Edwardsville (IL) Intelligencer newspaper on May 4, 1871 that quotes a former legislator as saying: “Laws are like sausages—the less you know of how they are made the better you like them.”
Of course, those 19th-century examples are not quite the same as the familiar modern wording.
To see how the phrase evolved in the following decades, I ran a search using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to search for documented appearances of phrases in millions of digitized books.
The Ngram results indicate that use of the phrase increased in the 20th century, with a sharp rise beginning in the 1970s.
When did Bismarck start being credited with the saying?
That seems to have happened several decades after he died, without any documented source.
The earliest attribution to him identified by quotation researchers is in a 1933 textbook titled Government in the United States by Claudius O. Johnson.
In a post about the saying on his great QuoteInvestigator.com site, Garson O’Toole says Johnson wrote: “I think it was Bismarck who said that the man who wishes to keep his respect for sausages and laws should not see how either is made.”
The attribution to Bismarck has been repeated many times, even though modern quotation experts consider it unproven. The Otto von Bismarck Foundation agrees.
In a March 15, 2016 article titled “Würste und Gesetze” (“Sausages and Laws”), the Foundation acknowledged the line sounds like something Bismarck might have said, but concluded there’s no evidence that he did.
So, like many old proverbial sayings, the origin of the all-too-true “laws are like sausages” adage is unknown.
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