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StillnessQuote494 of 1,961

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling, address to the Royal College of Surgeons

LiteratureLanguage

Why it matters

The idea in context

Attributed to Kipling. He calls words a 'drug' because language can intoxicate, console, inflame or heal — a reminder of how much power sits in what we say.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

Sözcükler, insanlığın kullandığı en güçlü ilaçtır.
Rudyard Kipling, Kraliyet Cerrahlar Koleji'ndeki konuşma

Kipling'e atfedilir. Sözcükleri bir 'uyuşturucu' olarak niteler; çünkü dil sarhoş edebilir, teselli edebilir, kışkırtabilir ya da iyileştirebilir — söylediklerimizde ne kadar güç olduğunun bir hatırlatması.

Source trail

Read beyond the card.

Background reading: Rudyard KiplingAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
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You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

From Kafka's novel The Trial (written 1914–15, published posthumously in 1925). In the cathedral scene, a priest tells Josef K. the parable “Before the Law”, and this line comes from their duel over its interpretation: the text is fixed, but the commentaries around it multiply endlessly. Kafka turns it into a warning about opinion itself — often it is not insight but anxiety wearing the costume of authority.

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Q1647
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Tsundoku is the practice of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. The word carries no reproach — it combines 'piling things up' with 'reading', and Japanese usage treats the pile as fairly harmless.

It appears in print as early as the 1870s, originally as a mild joke about scholars whose collections outran their reading. The affection in it is the point: a stack of unread books is a record of intentions, curiosity and optimism, not a moral failure. The writer Umberto Eco kept a library of tens of thousands of volumes and argued the unread ones were the valuable part — a private reminder of how much there is still to know. English borrowed the word only recently, which suggests the need was there all along.

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Q1866
WonderArchaeology

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri preserve literary works beside contracts, tax records, letters and shopping lists recovered from ancient Egyptian rubbish deposits.

Dry sand preserved a radically mixed archive: fragments of Sappho and lost plays sit beside rent disputes, school exercises and private anxieties. More than a century after excavation began, the collection is still being joined, read and published, fragment by fragment. Its power lies in both scale and disorder. The written life of a city—handled, corrected and discarded—is being reassembled across generations.

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