honesty is the best policy
English
Etymology
Attested since the early 1600s. Policy had the meaning of ‘shrewdness, cunning’ and ‘trick, stratagem’ at the time, so that the saying was originally an oxymoron in the same vein as attack is the best form of defence.
Proverb
honesty is the best policy
- Honesty is preferable as a course of action because it tends to work out best in the end.
- a. 1605, reprinted 1673, Edwin Sandys, Europae Speculum; Or A View Or Survey of the State of Religion in the Western Parts of the World, page 112:
- All theſe things conſidered, it hath made me to mitigate my former imagination, and to deem it not unpoſſible, that this over-politick and too wiſe Order may reach a note higher than our groſs conceits, who think honeſty the beſt policy, and truth the onely durable armor of proof; […]
- 1842, published 1843, anonymous, “Precepts and Proverbs” in The Common School Journal, volume 5, number 24, page 383:
- Honesty is the best policy; but he who acts on that principle is not an honest man. He only is an honest man who does that which is right because it is right, and not from motives of policy; and then, he is rewarded by finding afterwards that the honest course he has pursued was in reality the most politic.
- a. 1605, reprinted 1673, Edwin Sandys, Europae Speculum; Or A View Or Survey of the State of Religion in the Western Parts of the World, page 112:
Translations
Translations
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