Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person

Not Publilius Syrus — Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790 · Printer, scientist and Founding Father
Disputed Free to reuse

This sentence is Franklin’s: it was printed in Poor Richard improved — Poor Richard’s Almanack — for 1755, in the “Aspects” column beside December’s astronomical data, as “Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man.” Publilius Syrus’s collected sententiae do carry a barer Roman ancestor, Pacem cum hominibus habebis, bellum cum vitiis — peace with men, war with vices — but nothing about neighbours or the New Year, and Franklin, a famous borrower of proverbs, may himself have been polishing an older saying rather than coining one.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person” Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack for 1755 — "Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man." Not Publilius Syrus, though the Roman sententiae carry a plainer relative: "Pacem cum hominibus habebis, bellum cum vitiis." Via quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Publilius Syrus. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin Franklin — American printer, scientist and Founding Father. Theme: "Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person". 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 "Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person". 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

Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1755

Work
Poor Richard improved: Being an Almanack and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon … (Poor Richard’s Almanack) for 1755
Author
Benjamin Franklin, writing as “Richard Saunders”
Placement
The “Aspects” column, interleaved with the astronomical data for December
Reprinted
Sayings of Poor Richard, in Autobiography. Poor Richard. Letters (D. Appleton, 1904), p. 229

A long Life may not be good enough, but a good Life is long enough.

Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man. Sayings of Poor Richard

The almanac capitalised the salient words, spelled Neighbours with a u, hyphenated New-Year, and ended “a better Man”; the modern “better person” is a later update. This pairing with the “long Life” maxim is how the two lines sit on page 229 of Franklin’s collected Sayings of Poor Richard ↗.

Digitised reprint, 1904
Read Sayings of Poor Richard at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the 1755 Poor Richard citation, with a scan of the December page

How we verified this

  • 1755 — The sentence appears in Franklin’s Poor Richard improved for 1755, in the “Aspects” column beside December’s astronomical data: “Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man.” Quote Investigator reproduces the page scan ↗.
  • 1856 — Darius Lyman’s English Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus gives, as no. 636, the much plainer “Be at war with men’s vices, at peace with themselves” — no neighbours, no New Year. Read the 1856 translation ↗.
  • 1883 — Victor Duruy’s History of Rome printed adages ascribed to Syrus, among them “Forgive others often, thyself never; for one must live at peace with men, but at war with one’s own vices” — under a footnote warning that “Interpolations have been made in this collection; some of these sentences do not belong to Syrus.” Quote Investigator quotes both the adage and the footnote ↗.
  • 1904 — Franklin’s collected Autobiography. Poor Richard. Letters reprints the maxim word for word on page 229. Internet Archive full text ↗.
Public domain

Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1755 was printed in Philadelphia in Franklin’s own lifetime, so both the almanac and the 1904 D. Appleton reprint that carries the line are long out of copyright in the United States. The Latin sententiae of Publilius Syrus and Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering of them are public domain as well.

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

Who else gets the credit

Publilius Syrus is a magnet for this one, and not for nothing — the Roman collection really does contain a maxim about peace with men and war with vices. What it does not contain is this sentence.

Publilius Syrus Wrong wording

The Latin sententiae attributed to Syrus include Pacem cum hominibus habebis, bellum cum vitiis — literally, you will have peace with men, war with vices — printed among the main Sententiae at The Latin Library ↗ — though the same text repeats that line word for word in its appendix of sayings falso inter Publilianas receptae, falsely received as Publilius’s, so even the Roman ancestor is not securely his. Darius Lyman’s standard 1856 English version renders a maxim as “Be at war with men’s vices, at peace with themselves” (no. 636 ↗). Neither mentions a neighbour or a new year, and Wikiquote’s Publilius Syrus page ↗ does not carry the popular sentence in any section.

Benjamin Franklin Printed it — may not have coined it

Franklin published the wording, but Quote Investigator ↗ says plainly that it does not know whether this advice originated with him, since many almanac sayings came from elsewhere. Wikipedia records that Franklin reckoned he wrote perhaps one proverb in ten ↗, finding the rest in anthologies.

An anonymous Spanish maxim Parallel, not source

In 1827, American newspapers ran a set headed “Ancient and Modern Maxims: Translated from the Spanish,” including “Have peace with all men, war with all vices, and concord with thyself” — with no credit to Franklin. Quote Investigator lists the printings ↗. It shows how widely the thought travelled, not that it is this sentence’s source.

The sentence people share at New Year — vices, neighbours, a better man — is Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1755. The Roman relative Publilius Syrus is credited with is the far barer “peace with men, war with vices.” Quote Investigator ↗

Context

Why the Roman gets the credit

Franklin’s almanacs were not essay collections. They were working calendars — sunrise tables, moon phases, planetary aspects — and the maxims were set in the gaps, a line at a time, where a reader’s eye would fall while checking the weather. This one sat in the December column of the almanac for 1755 — the last month in the book — which is why it reads as a New Year’s resolution.

The Syrus credit sticks because it is half true. The Roman collection does hold a sentence about keeping peace with men and war with vices, and the thought is old enough that it surfaces in an 1827 American newspaper as a Spanish maxim with nobody’s name on it. But the specific shape people quote — your vices, your neighbours, every New Year, a better man — is a printer’s compression, and it first appears under Franklin’s imprint.

Be at war with men’s vices, at peace with themselves.

How a Roman maxim became a New Year’s resolution

The oldest layer is Latin: Pacem cum hominibus habebis, bellum cum vitiis, among the sententiae handed down under Publilius Syrus’s name. Even there the ground is soft — when Victor Duruy printed a set of Syrus adages in 1883, his own edition carried a footnote conceding that interpolations had been made and that some of the sentences do not belong to Syrus at all.

The middle layer is proverbial and unattributed: the 1827 “Ancient and Modern Maxims” column, translated from the Spanish, ran “Have peace with all men, war with all vices, and concord with thyself” without crediting anyone. The top layer is Franklin’s, and it is the one that survived — reprinted as a “Franklin Maxim” in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1894 and gathered into his collected writings in 1904.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Growth Kindness

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the sentence to Poor Richard's Almanack for 1755 with a scan of the December page, and lists the 1827, 1883, 1894 and 1904 printings.
Franklin's collected Sayings of Poor Richard (1904)archive.org

Page 229 prints the maxim in its original spelling, beside the "long Life" saying.
The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus (Lyman, 1856)archive.org

The standard English Syrus collection; no. 636 is the related "at war with men's vices" maxim, and nothing in it joins that thought to neighbours or a New Year — the volume never uses the words "new year" at all.
Publilius Syrus, Sententiae (Latin text)thelatinlibrary.com

Carries "Pacem cum hominibus habebis, bellum cum vitiis" among the main sententiae — and then again, word for word, in its appendix of sayings falsely received as Publilian.
Wikiquote: Publilius Syrusen.wikiquote.org

Sourced, misattributed and unsourced maxims — the popular New Year sentence appears in none of them.
Wikipedia: Poor Richard's Almanacken.wikipedia.org

Publication history 1732–1758 under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, and Franklin's own estimate that he wrote about one proverb in ten.

The true author

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790 · American printer, scientist and Founding Father

Benjamin Franklin printed Poor Richard’s Almanack from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders, packing its margins with the proverbs that made him the most quoted American of his century. He was also a scientist, postmaster, diplomat and Founding Father — but by his own reckoning he wrote only about one proverb in ten himself, finding the rest in older anthologies and sharpening them. That habit is precisely why so many “Franklin” maxims, this one included, come with an argument attached.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Franklin, Benjamin [as Richard Saunders]. Poor Richard improved: Being an Almanack and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon… Philadelphia, 1755, column of “Aspects” for December. Reprinted in Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography. Poor Richard. Letters (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), “Sayings of Poor Richard,” 229.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/be-at-war-with-your-vices-at-peace-with-your-neighbours-and/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied