War & Peace Quote by Jean Rostand

Rostand’s line has the cool confidence of a scientist who’s watched ego spar with evidence and seen evidence win on appeal. “Truth is always served” frames truth less as a fragile ideal than as a system with gravity: reality doesn’t need good PR, it just needs competent people to keep bumping into it. The sly twist is the second clause - “even if they fight it” - which punctures the heroic myth of the objective genius. Great minds, Rostand implies, are not saints of rationality; they’re often attached to pet theories, reputations, and the very human desire to be right. Their resistance is part of the engine.

The intent isn’t to flatter intelligence so much as to redirect where we place our trust. Rostand doesn’t claim truth is served by “good” minds, or sincere ones, but by great ones: people capable of producing tools, experiments, arguments, and counterarguments robust enough to outlast their own biases. Subtext: the scientific enterprise advances not because individuals are pure, but because method, competition, and scrutiny turn even stubbornness into data.

Context matters. Rostand lived through a century where science was both exalted and weaponized - genetics, eugenics, world wars, the prestige of “expertise” alongside its political misuse. In that landscape, the quote reads like a defense of inquiry against the cult of personality. Even when brilliant people cling to wrong ideas, their rigor creates the conditions for their ideas to be disproven. Truth gets served, sometimes, by the very lawyers trying to beat the case.