The real story

This phrase does not appear in any published translation of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." The documented origin is the 1974 film "The Godfather Part II," written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, where Michael Corleone says: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." Wikiquote lists the Sun Tzu attribution as unsourced. While Sun Tzu does write about knowing one's enemy — "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles" (Chapter 3) — the "keep close" formulation is absent from the text. The misattribution to Sun Tzu appears to have spread after the Godfather film popularized the line, with audiences and business writers searching for an ancient authority to lend it gravitas.