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Who really said it

Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made

Not Bismarck — credited to John Godfrey Saxe John Godfrey Saxe 1816–1887 · American lawyer-poet, newspaper editor and public lecturer
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No German original has ever been traced, and Bismarck was not linked to the quip until 1933 — thirty-five years after his death. The earliest version on record belongs to the American lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe, quoted in the University Chronicle of the University of Michigan on 27 March 1869: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” The snappy modern one-liner is a later condensation of that sentence, not anyone’s documented words — Quote Investigator ↗.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made” John Godfrey Saxe, quoted in the University Chronicle (University of Michigan), 27 March 1869. Not Otto von Bismarck: no German source exists and the Bismarck attribution first appears in 1933, thirty-five years after his death. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Otto von Bismarck. Use the credit shown above instead.

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of John Godfrey Saxe — American lawyer-poet, newspaper editor and lecturer. Theme: "Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made". 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.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made". 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

Where the line actually appears

Earliest attestation
University Chronicle (University of Michigan), Ann Arbor, 27 March 1869, p. 4
Credited to
John Godfrey Saxe — quoted by the press, not printed in a book of his own
Corroborating cite
Daily Cleveland Herald, 29 March 1869 (Fred Shapiro); a further Saxe attribution of 29 April 1869 (Ralph Keyes)
First tied to Bismarck
1933 — Claudius O. Johnson, Government in the United States, p. 321

“Laws,” says that illustrious rhymer, Mr. John Godfrey Saxe, “like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made;” and we fancy it is much the same with impeachment trials. University Chronicle · 27 March 1869

This is the earliest appearance Quote Investigator has located. Note what it is and is not: a newspaper quoting Saxe in passing, applied to an impeachment trial. It is not the pithy modern sentence, and it is not Bismarck.

Digitized volume
University Chronicle, Volume 3 on Google Books
Quote Investigator: Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made

How we verified this

  • 27 March 1869 — the earliest appearance located by Quote Investigator ↗: the University Chronicle at the University of Michigan quotes “that illustrious rhymer, Mr. John Godfrey Saxe” on laws, sausages and respect.
  • 29 March 1869 — the Daily Cleveland Herald carries the same line credited to Saxe. Fred Shapiro reported this cite for the Yale Book of Quotations and concluded it “may be the true origin of the saying,” as quoted by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1933 — the first known link to Bismarck, in Claudius O. Johnson’s textbook Government in the United States, and even there it is a guess: “I think it was Bismarck who said…” (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • Today — Wikiquote ↗ lists the saying in its Misattributed section for Bismarck, pointing to the same 1869 University Chronicle citation for Saxe.

No rights status is claimed for the popular wording — “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made” is an anonymous twentieth-century condensation with no identified author or first publication, so there is nothing to date. The 1869 sentence reproduced above is a different matter: it was printed in the University Chronicle at Ann Arbor on 27 March 1869 and in the Daily Cleveland Herald two days later, both far outside any surviving US copyright term.

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 gets credit, and who earned it

This is one of the most confidently misquoted lines in political English. Three separate things have gone wrong with it: the speaker, the century, and the words.

Otto von Bismarck The false credit

Bismarck (1815–1898) is credited almost universally, but no German original has ever been produced and the attribution post-dates his death by decades. The earliest Bismarck citation Quote Investigator ↗ can find is a 1933 textbook that hedges with “I think it was Bismarck.” The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations files the line under Misquotations with the verdict “attributed to Bismarck, but not traced and probably apocryphal,” and Wikiquote ↗ lists it as Misattributed.

Nobody — the familiar wording is orphaned Wording

Saxe’s attested sentence is longer and more interesting: laws “cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” The clipped versions in circulation — “better not to see them being made,” “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making” — are later compressions that Professor Buzzkill ↗ describes as having lost the original’s analytical edge. No source document for the popular one-liner has been identified.

Nicolas Chamfort Precursor, not source

The thought is older than Saxe. Quote Investigator ↗ traces a French version printed in 1798 in L’Esprit des Journaux — one risks disgust on seeing how administration, justice and dinner are prepared — which Chamfort himself credited to a witty advocate named Marchand, though later printings dropped that acknowledgement. It is an ancestor of the idea, not the source of the English sentence.

The honest credit line is John Godfrey Saxe, on the strength of contemporary newspaper attributions from March 1869 — a conclusion reached independently by Fred Shapiro and Ralph Keyes and set out in full by Quote Investigator ↗, which advises crediting Saxe rather than Bismarck.

Context

Why this one travelled so far

It is the perfect political aphorism: short, cynical, and flattering to whoever repeats it. It is also the perfect misattribution — an American joke about legislatures, transplanted onto the most quotable statesman of the nineteenth century, decades after he was dead.

The transplant is documented. Quote Investigator’s earliest Bismarck citation is a 1933 university textbook, Government in the United States by Claudius O. Johnson, whose chapter on congressional procedure opens with a shrug: “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.” Later writers dropped the hedge. By 1958 an Ogden, Utah newspaper could call it “an old saying attributed to Prince Bismarck” without blinking.

Bismarck died in 1898. The first person to put this line in his mouth did so in 1933.

The sausage duel that may have made the swap feel right

Quote Investigator raises one further possibility, flagged there as speculative: Bismarck was already publicly associated with sausages. A widely reprinted anecdote — located by QI in a South Carolina newspaper, The Mountaineer, on 18 July 1867 — has Bismarck challenging the pathologist Rudolf Virchow to a duel, and Virchow, then studying trichinosis, choosing sausages as the weapons: one infected, one clean, with Bismarck to take his pick at breakfast.

Whether or not that yarn greased the misattribution, it explains why “Bismarck” and “sausage” sat comfortably in the same sentence for readers long before anyone credited him with the aphorism itself.

Explore

Filed under

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

Power Truth Justice

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 Origin: Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Madequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the 1869 Saxe attestations, the 1933 first Bismarck citation, and the 1867 Virchow sausage-duel anecdote.
Otto von Bismarck — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote lists the sausage line among Bismarck’s misattributed quotations and points to the 27 March 1869 University Chronicle citation.
Talk page: sourcing the sausage quoteen.wikiquote.org

Editors’ working notes on the attribution, including the absence of any German-language source and searches of JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis and Google Books.
Bismarck, Laws, and Sausagesprofessorbuzzkill.com

Historian’s fact-check reaching the same verdict: no evidence Bismarck said it, credit belongs to Saxe, Bismarck attached only in the 1930s.
One Would Risk Being Disgusted If One Saw Politics, Justice, or One’s Dinner in the Makingquoteinvestigator.com

The French precursor: a 1798 printing in L’Esprit des Journaux, credited by Chamfort to an advocate named Marchand.
The Poems of John Godfrey Saxe (1872)archive.org

Full scan of Saxe’s collected poems, Boston: J. Osgood, 1872 — the verse that made him quotable enough to be quoted by newspapers.
John Godfrey Saxeen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the Vermont lawyer, editor and comic poet (1816–1887) to whom the aphorism is credited.

The man who actually said it

Who was John Godfrey Saxe?

John Godfrey Saxe

1816–1887 · American lawyer-poet, newspaper editor and lecturer

John Godfrey Saxe was a Vermont attorney who became one of nineteenth-century America’s most popular comic poets — admitted to the bar in 1843, State’s Attorney for Chittenden County, and editor of the Burlington Sentinel from 1850 to 1856. He is best remembered today for The Blind Men and the Elephant, but in his own lifetime he was a celebrity of the lecture circuit, and newspapers routinely printed his one-liners as the sayings of “that illustrious rhymer.” That is exactly how the sausage aphorism reaches us: not from a book of his, but from the press quoting him in the spring of 1869.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this

“Impeachment” item quoting John Godfrey Saxe, University Chronicle (University of Michigan), Ann Arbor, 27 March 1869, p. 4 — as documented in “Quote Origin: Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made,” Quote Investigator, 8 July 2010. Compare Fred R. Shapiro, Yale Book of Quotations, citing the Daily Cleveland Herald, 29 March 1869; and Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), 188, 324.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/laws-are-like-sausages-better-not-to-see-them-being-made/

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