Life & Wisdom Quote by John Harington

Power decides the dictionary, and Harington knows it. The couplet snaps shut like a legal trap: treason is supposedly a moral absolute, yet in practice it’s a label applied by whoever survives. The first line toys with the comforting civic fable that betrayal never “prospers,” that history contains an ethical fail-safe. Then the second line punctures it with a cold, almost courtroom logic: if the plot wins, it stops being a crime and becomes a revolution, a restoration, a “necessary correction.” The wit lands because it’s not grand philosophy; it’s procedural. Names follow outcomes.

Harington was writing in Elizabethan England, where succession anxiety, court factionalism, and the memory of recent rebellions made “treason” less a clear act than a political technology. Under Elizabeth I, the state expanded treason statutes and used them to police not only deeds but loyalties, speech, even imagined intentions. In that atmosphere, the line isn’t merely cynical; it’s defensive. It acknowledges that the boundary between traitor and patriot is patrolled by power, not principle, and it does so with the disarming lightness of a rhyme.

The subtext is a warning to both sides: don’t confuse victory with innocence, and don’t trust official language to tell you what happened. Harington’s neat paradox turns history into a mirror: the “treason” you condemn today may be the origin myth you celebrate tomorrow, once the winners start writing indictments as epics.