Science Quote by Andrei Sakharov

Sakharov’s line reads like a private vow overheard in public, and that’s the point: it’s engineered to survive pressure. “Both now and for always” does the work of defiance before the sentence even gets to its subject. It refuses the state’s favorite weapon against dissidents - time. Regimes can outlast scandals, grind down friends, rewrite newspapers. Sakharov answers with a timescale longer than propaganda.

The key phrase is “hidden strength.” He isn’t selling heroic individualism or triumphal optimism; he’s describing endurance that operates under concealment, the way moral conviction has to in a surveillance society. Hidden also implies underestimated. Power misreads people as compliant because compliance is visible; resilience happens offstage, in kitchens, in letters, in the decision to keep thinking clearly when the incentives all point to silence.

Coming from a physicist, the sentence carries an extra charge. Sakharov helped build the Soviet bomb, then turned against the system that praised his genius and demanded his obedience. He knew what “strength” looks like when it’s institutional: laboratories, budgets, secrecy, coercion. By contrast, the “human spirit” he’s defending isn’t a mystical abstraction; it’s the stubborn capacity to choose conscience over career, truth over safety. The line is also a subtle rebuke to cynicism. If you can be forced to say anything, you can be forced to believe nothing. Sakharov insists belief itself can be a form of resistance - durable, quiet, and hard to confiscate.