Wit & Attitude Quote by Simone Weil

Weil doesn’t bother with comforting myths. She takes a slogan you’ve heard in protest posters and graduation speeches - “ideas can’t be killed” - and treats it as what it often is: wishful thinking dressed up as moral law. The opening question is a trap: “Who were the fools…?” isn’t curiosity, it’s an indictment of the bourgeois faith that history bends toward truth if you simply speak it aloud.

Her point is brutally literal. Brute force kills ideas the same way it kills people: by destroying the bodies and institutions that carry them. Censorship, prisons, labor camps, the shutting of schools and presses, the slow starvation of attention - all of it turns living thought into inert “corpses.” The line is chilling because it refuses the romance of martyrdom. An idea doesn’t automatically become stronger when persecuted; often it simply disappears, leaving only a cautionary anecdote and a few hidden manuscripts.

The subtext is also self-implicating. Weil isn’t praising force; she’s warning moralists against confusing spiritual resilience with political reality. If you want ideas to survive, you need more than inner conviction: you need material protection, collective organization, and the unglamorous work of transmission. Written in Weil’s era - shadowed by fascism, war, and the industrial machinery of state violence - it reads like a rebuttal to the comforting liberal story that truth inevitably “wins.” She’s saying: truth has no guarantee. Power can erase. Your job is to notice that before the erasure looks like fate.