The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword

The Writing Is On The Pen?

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword

“The pen is mightier than the sword” is a metonymic adage coined by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. The play was about Cardinal Richelieu, though in the author’s words “license with dates and details… has been, though not unsparingly, indulged.” The Cardinal’s line in Act II, scene II, was more fully:

True, This! —
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! — itself a nothing! —
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! — Take away the sword —

States can be saved without it!
The play opened at London’s Covent Garden Theatre on 7 March 1839 with William Charles Macready in the lead role. Macready believed its opening night success was “unequivocal”; Queen Victoria attended a performance on 14 March.

In 1870, literary critic Edward Sherman Gould wrote that Bulwer “had the good fortune to do, what few men can hope to do: he wrote a line that is likely to live for ages.” By 1888 another author, Charles Sharp, feared that repeating the phrase “might sound trite and commonplace”. The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, which opened in 1897, has the adage decorating an interior wall.Though Bulwer’s phrasing was novel, the idea of communication surpassing violence in efficacy had numerous predecessors.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword

T.G.I.M. (Thank God It’s Monday)
Telling the story exactly how it happened, has happened, or perhaps better stated as will happen, this is a post that was to be written today as I work from the patio at Starbucks, and while there was a preset mental draft in regards to the topics that were to be touched upon, something interestingly enough interrupted the flow which I will now share in regards to what was posted on the social media status updates about an hour ago.

Lunchtime Status Update 12PM – Im working outside 2Day and plan 2 for the rest of this week, so when I got change 4 my food, the girl that Im cool with @SB’s asks if I am ok with a $2 Dollar Bill As Change? I said, you bet, that means its my lucky day! I looked it on up on BING and came back with 2 sides of the story. 1.Many say that they are UNLUCKY. 2.Others claim that there is a Black Man PICTURED on the back of the $2 Dollar Bill sitting @ the signing of the Dec. Of Independence sitting @ the table. Either way, the picture confirms that someone MUST write the scripts, so, its time to get my keys and pen a strokin! What would you like 4 YOUR life story 2 be?RB

This has been a 10 year and perhaps a lifelong venture into discovering the factors behind this popular phrase and slogan in regards to the pen and its level of might, so when I looked it up on Google, the Wikipedia write up listed above states that the Thomas Jefferson building in the U.S. Library Of Congress actually has the phrase as a decoration on one of its walls, the library building which happens to be named after the individual who is pictured on the front side of the piece of currency listed below as well as the original author of the formal  draft of the Declaration Of Independence which began with the pen.

Deuces! 2012 Edition.

Moral Of The Story

This is one of those posts that has no meaning other than what we each decide to assign to it and is offered in hopes of not answering the question but rather questioning the answers while reporting the news in real time which by default, leads to the automatic consideration of possibly different perspectives.