"Truth is mighty and will prevail"
About this Quote
"Truth is mighty and will prevail" is less a sunny aphorism than a piece of Protestant steel, forged in a century when England was tearing itself apart over who got to define reality. Thomas Brooks, a Puritan preacher-turned-writer, wasn’t offering a vague comfort blanket; he was staking a claim about authority. In a culture of pamphlet wars, censored pulpits, civil war propaganda, and shifting regimes, "truth" wasn’t just a virtue. It was a battleground.
The line works because it compresses two moves into one breath: it personifies truth as a force ("mighty") and then frames history as its inevitable theater ("will prevail"). That pairing is persuasive precisely because it turns patience into power. If you’re a dissenting believer, politically outmatched or socially suspect, the promise isn’t that you’ll win today; it’s that your losing can be reinterpreted as temporary and therefore meaningful. Brooks offers a theology of time: truth’s strength is not always visible, but it is ultimately undefeated.
The subtext is also disciplinary. If truth will prevail, then opposition is not just mistaken; it’s doomed. That’s rhetorically useful for a religious writer: it consoles the faithful, warns the wavering, and recasts uncertainty as a lack of trust rather than a rational response to chaos. In modern ears, the phrase can sound naive. In Brooks’s world, it was a survival tactic and a quiet threat, wrapped in biblical certainty.
The line works because it compresses two moves into one breath: it personifies truth as a force ("mighty") and then frames history as its inevitable theater ("will prevail"). That pairing is persuasive precisely because it turns patience into power. If you’re a dissenting believer, politically outmatched or socially suspect, the promise isn’t that you’ll win today; it’s that your losing can be reinterpreted as temporary and therefore meaningful. Brooks offers a theology of time: truth’s strength is not always visible, but it is ultimately undefeated.
The subtext is also disciplinary. If truth will prevail, then opposition is not just mistaken; it’s doomed. That’s rhetorically useful for a religious writer: it consoles the faithful, warns the wavering, and recasts uncertainty as a lack of trust rather than a rational response to chaos. In modern ears, the phrase can sound naive. In Brooks’s world, it was a survival tactic and a quiet threat, wrapped in biblical certainty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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