Science Quote by Abraham Pais

Cold pragmatism masquerading as a “rule,” this line captures the moral weather of life under occupation: trust is a luxury, and survival is an engineering problem. Abraham Pais, later celebrated as a physicist and biographer of Einstein, is speaking from the wartime Netherlands, where secrecy networks lived and died on tiny errors. The sentence is built like a protocol, not a confession. “Never assume” is the hard reset; “however honorable” strips heroism of its protective aura. Integrity doesn’t matter once pain becomes a tool.

The quote’s subtext is unsentimental and quietly devastating: torture is treated not as an exceptional horror but as a predictable variable in the system. Pais isn’t judging the hypothetical “Mr. X”; he’s refusing to load the burden of resistance onto someone else’s character. That’s a kind of ethical realism, but it also reveals how violence reshapes community. Bonds become conditional, friendships get recoded as potential security breaches, and compassion has to be expressed as planning: “I should move.”

The rhetorical power comes from its plainness. No slogans, no martyr mythology, just contingency. The euphemism “caught for some reason” hints at the randomness of raids and denunciations, the way people disappeared because a neighbor talked or a paper was misplaced. Pais’s intent is to document the logic that kept him alive, but the deeper effect is to show what tyranny does best: it turns human relationships into operational risks, and forces decent people to rehearse betrayal without blaming anyone for it.