Life & Wisdom Quote by William C. Bryant

Truth, Bryant suggests, has the bruised-knee durability of something aligned with reality, while error is a hypochondriac: a tiny nick becomes fatal because it has no underlying health to draw on. The line is melodramatic on purpose. A locomotive is the 19th century's loudest symbol of modern force, speed, and industrial inevitability. If truth can survive that, then truth is not just morally admirable; it's structurally resilient. Error, by contrast, doesn't get a heroic antagonist. It dies from lockjaw after a finger scratch, the kind of petty, preventable death that makes you suspect the victim was already fragile.

Bryant was writing in an America where newspapers, stump speeches, and reform movements treated public opinion as a battlefield. As a poet and editor, he lived inside the machinery that turns claims into common sense. This metaphor reads like a retort to the era's anxieties: if propaganda, demagoguery, or partisan fervor can "run over" the facts, what chance does truth have? Bryant's answer is defiant. Truth may be delayed, mangled, mocked, even flattened by the headline cycle of his day, but it heals because it corresponds to the world people eventually have to live in.

The subtext is a warning to the clever cynic. Error can look powerful in the moment, even fashionable, but it can't handle contact with reality's smallest tests. Truth doesn't need perfect handling; error does, and that's why it loses.