Daily Inspiration Quote by Boris Pasternak

Power doesn’t just lie; it auditions for godhood. Pasternak’s line lands with the cold precision of someone who watched a state turn governing into a theater of certainty, where the most dangerous thing isn’t dissent but doubt itself. The “myth of infallibility” is the giveaway: not a claim, a story - manufactured, repeated, enforced. Myths aren’t meant to be tested. They’re meant to be lived inside.

The sentence is built like an indictment. “So anxious” frames rulers less as masterminds than as panicked custodians of their own image, terrified that a single admitted mistake could crack the whole facade. Pasternak’s subtext is psychological: authority depends on the performance of unbroken confidence, and truth is intolerable not because it’s politically inconvenient but because it’s structurally corrosive. Once fallibility is acknowledged, power becomes negotiable.

Context sharpens the bite. Writing in the shadow of Soviet cultural control, Pasternak knew how official reality is produced: censorship, coerced unanimity, the replacement of facts with slogans that sound like facts. His phrasing - “do their utmost to ignore truth” - is almost bureaucratic, implying a systematic effort: committees, bans, “corrections,” euphemisms, and the social pressure that trains citizens to self-edit.

What makes it work is its quiet inversion. We like to imagine truth as something power suppresses because it’s strong. Pasternak suggests the opposite: power suppresses truth because it’s fragile. Infallibility isn’t governance; it’s a superstition with a police force.