"Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away"
About this Quote
A line like this doesn’t just shame cowardice; it indicts a whole moral economy that Sartre thought modern life was quietly running on. The phrasing is deliberately brutal: “beasts” versus “men,” “let themselves be killed” versus “run away.” One side is passive, almost farm-animal docility; the other is active evasion. Sartre’s provocation is that surrendering your agency is worse than dying. It’s a gut-punch version of his existential claim: you are what you do, and dodging responsibility is a choice you still own.
The subtext is aimed at “bad faith,” Sartre’s term for the self-protective lie that you had no real options. “Running away” here isn’t only physical desertion. It’s the everyday retreat into roles, excuses, and institutions that promise to absolve you: I was just following orders, just doing my job, just staying out of it. By contrasting that with animals “that let themselves be killed,” he’s suggesting that a human being who abdicates freedom is choosing a kind of moral animalhood, trading the terrifying burden of choice for the safety of instinct or submission.
Context matters: Sartre is a writer of the Occupation and its aftermath, when questions of collaboration, resistance, and postwar self-exoneration were raw. The line reads like a refusal of the soothing national narrative that many people had “no choice.” Sartre’s point isn’t that death is noble; it’s that escape from freedom is the real indignity.
The subtext is aimed at “bad faith,” Sartre’s term for the self-protective lie that you had no real options. “Running away” here isn’t only physical desertion. It’s the everyday retreat into roles, excuses, and institutions that promise to absolve you: I was just following orders, just doing my job, just staying out of it. By contrasting that with animals “that let themselves be killed,” he’s suggesting that a human being who abdicates freedom is choosing a kind of moral animalhood, trading the terrifying burden of choice for the safety of instinct or submission.
Context matters: Sartre is a writer of the Occupation and its aftermath, when questions of collaboration, resistance, and postwar self-exoneration were raw. The line reads like a refusal of the soothing national narrative that many people had “no choice.” Sartre’s point isn’t that death is noble; it’s that escape from freedom is the real indignity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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