Mightier Than The Sword Pdf

[Lorri Dent]

The pen is mightier than the sword" is an expression indicating that the written word is more effective than violence as a means of social or political change. This sentiment has been expressed with metaphorical contrasts of writing implements and weapons for thousands of years. The specific wording that "the pen is mightier than the sword" was first used by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.

The exact sentence was coined by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy.[1][2] The play was about Cardinal Richelieu, though in the author's words "license with dates and details ... has been, though not unsparingly, indulged".[1] The Cardinal's line in Act II, scene II, was more fully:[3]

The play opened at London's Covent Garden Theatre on 7 March 1839 with William Charles Macready in the lead role.[5] Macready believed its opening night success was "unequivocal"; Queen Victoria attended a performance on 14 March.[5]

In 1870, literary critic Edward Sherman Gould wrote that Bulwer "had the good fortune to do, what few men can hope to do: he wrote a line that is likely to live for ages".[2] By 1888 another author, Charles Sharp, feared that repeating the phrase "might sound trite and commonplace".[6] The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, which opened in 1897, has the adage decorating an interior wall.[7][8] Although Bulwer's phrasing was novel, the idea of communication surpassing violence in efficacy had numerous predecessors.

Assyrian sage Ahiqar, who reputedly lived during the early 7th century BCE, coined the first known version of this phrase. One copy of the Teachings of Ahiqar, dating to about 500 BCE, states, "The word is mightier than the sword."[10]

According to the website Trivia Library,[12] the book The People's Almanac[11] provides another very early example from Greek playwright Euripides, who died c. 406 BCE. He is supposed to have written: "The tongue is mightier than the blade."[12][a]

The Islamic prophet Muhammad is quoted, in a saying narrated by 'Abdullah ibn Amr: "There will be a tribulation that will wipe out the Arabs in which those killed on both sides are in the Hellfire. In that time the spoken word will be stronger than the sword".[14]

Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, who died in 1602 and was personal scribe and vizier to Akbar the Great, wrote of a gentleman put in charge of a fiefdom having "been promoted from the pen to the sword and taken his place among those who join the sword to the pen, and are masters both of peace and war."[15][17] Syad Muhammad Latif, in his 1896 history of Agra, quoted King Abdullah of Bokhara (Abdullah-Khan II), who died in 1598, as saying that "He was more afraid of Abu'l-Fazl's pen than of Akbar's sword."[18]

In contrast, Abu Tammam's Ode on the Conquest of Amorium poem intro: "The sword is the truest news [in comparison with] books... In its sharpness, the boundary between seriousness and play".[19]

In 1529, Antonio de Guevara, in Reloj de prncipes, compared a pen to a lance, books to arms, and a life of studying to a life of war.[20][21] Thomas North, in 1557, translated Reloj de prncipes into English as Diall of Princes.[21] The analogy would appear in again in 1582, in George Whetstone's An Heptameron of Civil Discourses: "The dashe of a Pen, is more greeuous than the counterbuse of a Launce."[22][b]

Netizens have suggested that a 1571 edition of Erasmus' Institution of a Christian Prince contains the words "There is no sworde to bee feared more than the Learned pen",[23][24] but this is not evident from modern translations[25] and this could be merely a spurious quotation.

Robert Burton, in 1621, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, stated: "It is an old saying, 'A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword': and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrilous and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-play or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever."[27] After listing several historical examples he concludes: "Hinc quam sit calamus saevior ense patet",[27] which translates as "From this it is clear how much more cruel the pen may be than the sword."[12]

Thomas Jefferson, on 19 June 1792, ended a letter to Thomas Paine with: "Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword: shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man, and be assured that it has not a more sincere votary nor you a more ardent well-wisher than Y[ou]rs. &c. Thomas Jefferson"[12][28]

Published in 1830, by Joseph Smith, an account in the Book of Mormon related, "The word had a greater tendency to lead the people to do that which was just; yea, it had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword".[29]

Dishonored does pit you against multiple enemies at once, so it too (and really all modern games when you think about it) is a less intimate experience than Prince of Persia. However, its sword fighting mechanics are designed around this idea so that every brief clash is like a piece of flash fiction.

Erica Chenoweth: Yes. Well, the first thing I would say is that in the study, we focus on nonviolent resistance above and beyond just protest. Which is key because there's no evidence to suggest that nonviolent protests on their own are successful, but nonviolent resistance as a category of action, meaning the combination of protest, strikes, boycotts, stay-aways, and other forms of nonviolent action can together have a lot of potential for creating political and social change. It doesn't always succeed, but it succeeds more often than its violent counterparts. And it succeeds much more often than a lot of skeptics think.

The reasons why we think that nonviolent resistance is a more effective form of struggle in many contexts is because first of all, far more people are willing to engage in nonviolent resistance than are willing to engage in armed insurrection. That allows these movements to really pull out the different dissident capacity of a country: men, women, children, youth, elderly, people with disabilities. People who ordinarily wouldn't volunteer to join an armed insurrection on their own accord might be more willing and capable of participating in methods that are not asking them to use offensive violence.

Erica Chenoweth: They're less fearful. Sometimes they're very afraid, but there's power in numbers, and that has a self-reinforcing effect. If you're sitting and looking out your apartment window in a very repressive country, and somebody spreads a rumor that there's going to be a major uprising downtown against the security forces, the average person, if they look out their window and don't see anybody in the streets, probably wants to stay home and hunker down.

Whereas if you hear that there's a mass uprising and people are going to the square and you look out your window and you see 100 people going down the alleyway singing songs to the square, you're going to be much more likely to say, "You know what? I'm not going to miss this moment." And it's kind of an optical illusion, but it's still something that is effective in pulling out more people to participate.

Thoko Moyo: And so, just talking about the sort of combinations, and you mentioned a few of them, let's examine that. How often are some of these campaigns using the various methods of stay-aways in addition to being out on the streets? What has your research shown?

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, that's a great question. I can't think of the exact breakdown off the top of my head, but in looking at about 550 mass mobilizations from 1900 through 2018, I can say that among the nonviolent mass movements that have succeeded, the vast majority combined far more actions than just mass demonstrations and protests. So they were doing limited or full general strikes, they were engaging in boycotts of products or of elections, or engaging in certain types of noncooperation, which can mean shunning leaders or refusing to send in taxes or refusing to engage in behaviors you're expected to do.

Or they're doing stay-at-homes where they're banging on pots and pans at night, or shutting off the electricity at certain times of day and then shutting it back on ... or turning it back on so that it creates some disruption. Most of the campaigns that succeed have some combination of these different methods.

Thoko Moyo: You've talked about the fact that no existing power has power permanently, and that to maintain the status quo, they're 100% reliant on the cooperation obedience and help of people who reside in different pillars of support. Talk to me about that. What is that idea?

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. That's actually an idea drawn from Gene Sharp's work on the theory of nonviolent action, which itself draws on ideas about the nature of power from Hannah Arendt to Henry David Thoreau. And essentially what Sharp was saying was that we have this illusion in our minds that, especially totalitarian regimes, but even semi-authoritarian or authoritarian regimes, are sort of permanently in charge. They've figured out a way to gain the system such that they're impenetrable and invulnerable to challenge from below. And of course, this is a very convenient narrative for those regimes, because they think that it will prevent these challenges from developing.

Erica Chenoweth: Exactly, exactly. It's just demoralizing, and people have apathy and they accept the status quo. But what Arendt and later Sharp were arguing was that actually, this is an illusion, and it's a very convenient illusion for power holders, where in fact, what they know in secret is that their power is fragile and delicate, and that it's totally dependent on whether A) the people continue to believe that, and B) the people who are close to them whom they've entrusted with certain types of authority and power themselves also decide to continue supporting them.

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