"I decline to accept the end of man"
About this Quote
A polite verb - "decline" - carries the force of a fist. Faulkner frames apocalypse not as an unavoidable fate but as an invitation he can refuse, the way you refuse a bad deal. That phrasing matters: it demotes catastrophe from cosmic decree to human paperwork. The line’s confidence is almost insolent, a novelist telling history it doesn’t get the last word.
Context sharpens the stakes. Faulkner delivered it in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, with the Cold War thickening the air and nuclear annihilation newly imaginable. Plenty of mid-century intellectuals were flirting with despair, dressing it up as realism. Faulkner rejects that posture as a failure of imagination, the one faculty a writer can’t afford to lose. His target isn’t just the bomb; it’s the cultural habit of treating fear as wisdom.
The subtext is craft as ethics. "Accept" and "decline" are choices, and choices imply responsibility. If you accept "the end of man", you stop demanding better of language, politics, and each other; you start writing requiems instead of building arguments. Faulkner is also, quietly, making a case for art’s relevance: the writer’s job is to insist on human endurance when institutions, headlines, and even science are busy rehearsing extinction.
The phrase "end of man" is deliberately blunt, almost biblical, because he’s fighting on the only terrain that matches the threat: not policy detail, but morale. It’s less prophecy than refusal - a stance meant to be contagious.
Context sharpens the stakes. Faulkner delivered it in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, with the Cold War thickening the air and nuclear annihilation newly imaginable. Plenty of mid-century intellectuals were flirting with despair, dressing it up as realism. Faulkner rejects that posture as a failure of imagination, the one faculty a writer can’t afford to lose. His target isn’t just the bomb; it’s the cultural habit of treating fear as wisdom.
The subtext is craft as ethics. "Accept" and "decline" are choices, and choices imply responsibility. If you accept "the end of man", you stop demanding better of language, politics, and each other; you start writing requiems instead of building arguments. Faulkner is also, quietly, making a case for art’s relevance: the writer’s job is to insist on human endurance when institutions, headlines, and even science are busy rehearsing extinction.
The phrase "end of man" is deliberately blunt, almost biblical, because he’s fighting on the only terrain that matches the threat: not policy detail, but morale. It’s less prophecy than refusal - a stance meant to be contagious.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | William Faulkner, Nobel Lecture (Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech), 1950 — contains the line "I decline to accept the end of man". |
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