law and sausage

Factual Questions
1

Forgive me if this question has already been asked. I tried the search engine and it didn’t want to cooperate.

I recently had occassion to use that tired old cliche, “People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made.” A co-worker asked for the origin of the quote.

I went to Google, which returned 45,000 hits for my search query. After reading the first 200 or so, I found the phrase (or variations thereof) usually quoted without attribution. Those sites that did give an author listed Otto von Bismark, Willie Brown, Winston Churchill, Ben Franklin, Reader’s Digest, Will Rogers, Betty Talmadge, and Mark Twain.

So, does anybody know who coined this phrase? If all we have is speculation, then let’s leave it be. I’m not looking to lengthen the list of suspects – I want the Straight Dope! If it’s Twain, tell me what book. If it’s Bismark, tell me what speech. I want to track down that original source. Or, if this is the “whole nine yards” of popular quotation, fine, I’ll know to stop looking.

Thanks in advance for your help,

– Beruang

2

Haven’t got an answer for you but you could try asking the people at the
[Quoteland discussion group]
(http://forum.quoteland.com/1/OpenTopic?q=Y&a=frm&s=586192041&f=099191541). They’re usually very good with this sort of stuff.

You’ll have to logon first

3

John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), though commonly misattributed to Otto von Bismarck.

4

And when you read the Saxe reference in context, even it sounds like an attribution rather than a direct quote.