Politics & Power Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg turns the heroic origin story inside out with a single grammatical trick: Columbus, the supposed discoverer, is rendered the discovered. That reversal is the joke, but it is also the accusation. If an American “first discovered Columbus,” then the encounter is framed from the vantage of the people already living there, and the “bad discovery” isn’t a navigational error; it’s a catastrophic meeting of worlds.

The line works because it refuses the polite euphemisms that usually sand down empire. “Bad” is blunt, almost childish in its simplicity, which only sharpens the cynicism: the damage is so obvious it hardly needs philosophical scaffolding. Lichtenberg’s wit behaves like a scalpel, cutting through the self-congratulating narrative of European progress and exposing what that progress required: conquest, disease, forced labor, cultural erasure. By calling it a “discovery,” he mimics the language of the colonizers; by assigning the act to “the American,” he indicts that language as propaganda.

Context matters. Writing in the late Enlightenment, Lichtenberg was surrounded by a Europe that prized reason, classification, and “advancement,” even as colonial extraction underwrote much of its confidence. As a scientist, he knew that naming is power: to label something “discovered” is to claim it, to file it under your own story. His aphorism punctures that claim. It’s not anti-exploration; it’s anti-myth, and it lands because it treats history’s most polished monument as a punchline with teeth.