Half the truth is often a great lie.

The saying belongs to Poor Richard’s Almanack, the almanac that Franklin wrote in Philadelphia every year from 1733 to 1758 under the name of Richard Saunders, a needy stargazer. Between the calendars and the weather, Poor Richard slipped in maxims, many borrowed from older collections and sharpened by Franklin. The Wikisource text gathers these sayings in alphabetical order, and this one stands between “Half hospitality opens his door and shuts up his countenance” and “Half wits talk much but say little”.

The point is subtle: a lie built from true statements, with the awkward part left out, works better than a plain falsehood. Tennyson made the same point in “The Grandmother”: “a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.”

The almanac sold nearly ten thousand copies a year, Franklin recalled, and in its last issue he strung the best of its proverbs into the speech of Father Abraham, known ever since as The Way to Wealth.

Poor Richard’s Almanack

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