--- title: "Sun Tzu never wrote ‘keep your enemies closer’; the line comes from The Godfather Part II" url: https://badiyaa.com/sun-tzu-keep-your-enemies-closer-godfather/ published: 2026-10-21T23:52:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-21T23:52:00+01:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Sun Tzu never wrote ‘keep your enemies closer’; the line comes from The Godfather Part II The 1910 Giles translation of The Art of War has no such advice, and a September 1973 draft of the screenplay gives Michael Corleone a different lesson. Search the standard English translation of Sun Tzu’s *The Art of War* from cover to cover and the advice to keep your enemies closer than your friends never turns up. The line belongs to Michael Corleone in the 1974 film *The Godfather Part II*, and the American Film Institute ranks it No. 58 on its list of the 100 greatest movie quotes, in this exact form: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” The saying is routinely credited to the Chinese general online and in quote collections, but the paper trail points somewhere else entirely: a Hollywood script, and a late change to it. ## What the Art of War actually contains [The Art of War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War) is traditionally credited to a general known as Sun Tzu, “Master Sun,” said to have lived in the sixth century BCE, although Chinese scholars began doubting he existed around the 12th century and the oldest layers of the text probably came at least a hundred years after him. Bamboo-slip copies sealed in two Han dynasty tombs near Linyi, in Shandong province, and dug up in 1972, cover about a third of the modern chapters and track them very closely. The version most English readers meet is Lionel Giles’s 1910 translation, the first annotated one in English, made while he worked in the department of Oriental printed books and manuscripts at the British Museum, and long out of copyright. Giles billed it as the oldest military treatise in the world and, in his dedication, as a work 2,400 years old. It runs to 13 chapters, each packed with commentary from Chinese scholars. We searched the complete text of that edition, introduction and commentary included. The word “friend” and its variants appear just eight times, and none of them is advice about friends. Three come from one passage in the introduction praising a commentator as “my friend Sheng-yu.” One quotes a British officer on Wellington’s skill at deceiving “both friend and foe.” The other four describe envoys opening friendly relations, a deceptive message “of friendly import,” a mournful parting between friends and a dominant power able to “dispense with external friendships.” The phrase “enemies closer” appears zero times. ## Where Sun Tzu talks about enemies Sun Tzu does have a famous line about knowing the other side, and it may explain why the movie quote drifted toward him. In chapter three, on attack by stratagem, Giles renders it this way: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” The closest the book comes to “keep them close” is in its final chapter, on spies. There the advice is to win over the opponent’s agents rather than to befriend the opponent: “The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed.” Earlier in the same chapter, Sun Tzu says the general’s most intimate relations in the whole army should be with his spies. That is intelligence work, not a rule for handling rivals at dinner. ## Where the line came from In the film, Michael says it to Frank Pentangeli in his father’s old study, as Pentangeli presses to strike at the Rosato brothers, who have the backing of Hyman Roth. Michael wants him to make peace instead, so Roth will believe nothing is wrong. The wording appears to have arrived late. A second-draft screenplay credited to Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, dated September 24, 1973, stages the same conversation in the same room, but Michael’s lesson from his father is different: “My father taught me, in this room, never to act until you know everything that’s behind things.” The friends-and-enemies phrasing is not in that draft at all, which suggests it was sharpened between the draft and the finished picture. For anyone checking a quote card, the comparison is simple: - **Art of War, Giles translation (1910):** no line about keeping friends or enemies close. - **Second-draft screenplay (September 1973):** “never to act until you know everything that’s behind things.” - **The Godfather Part II (1974):** “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Pinning the line on an ancient Chinese general gives a crime drama’s dialogue borrowed authority, and it buries a sharper point Sun Tzu really made about who belongs closest to a commander. Giles numbers it paragraph 14 of chapter 13: “Hence it is that with none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies.” ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: The Art of War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War) *Image: Gary Todd, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*