Three may keep a secret, if two of them are…

The saying comes from Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Benjamin Franklin published every year in Philadelphia under the name of Richard Saunders. On Wikisource the almanac’s sayings are collected in alphabetical order, so this one keeps company with other threes: just before, “Three good meals a day is bad living”, and just after, “Three things are men most likely to be cheated in, a horse, a wig, and a wife.”

The joke works like a trap: it starts as a reassurance, then closes on the only real guarantee of silence. It sharpens an older English proverb, which Shakespeare’s Nurse quotes in Romeo and Juliet: “Two may keep counsel, putting one away.”

The same black humour runs through the almanac. In his very first issue, Poor Richard predicted the death of a rival almanac-maker, Titan Leeds, and kept up the joke when Leeds protested that he was alive.

Poor Richard's Almanack, 1735

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work