“One person can keep a secret, but not two.”
Source: Ready Player One
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Ernest Cline28
writer 1972Related quotes
“Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”
Stephen King book Under the Dome
Source: Under the Dome
“Only two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
Sara Shepard Pretty Little Liars
Source: Pretty Little Liars
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Source: Quoted by Gerald Gawalt in " In His Own Words: Library Exhibition Celebrates Tercentenary of Benjamin Franklin's Birth https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0601/franklin.html"
Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer
Vol. I; XL
Lacon (1820)
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”
Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin
Source: The Blind Assassin
“One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.”
Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor
Address to Polaroid employees at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts (5 February 1960), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 7
Land was not the first to make such observations; in One Man in His Time (1922), p. 162, Ellen Glasgow has a character state:
Half the time when he is telling the truth, it sounds like a joke, and that keeps people from believing him. He says the best way to keep a secret is to shout it from the housetops; and I've heard him say things straight out that sounded so far fetched nobody would think he was in earnest. I was the only person who knew that he was speaking the truth.
“How can we expect others to keep our secrets if we cannot keep them ourselves?”
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs
Comment prétendons-nous qu'un autre puisse garder notre secret, si nous ne pouvons le garder nous-mêmes?
Maxim 64 of the Maximes supprimées.
Later Additions to the Maxims