Speaking Truth to Power

The phrase “speak truth to power” entered common usage through a 1955 pamphlet by the American Friends Service Committee, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. Bayard Rustin and other Quaker thinkers framed it as a moral summons: to confront unjust authority not with weapons but with conscience, honesty, and nonviolent resistance. Yet the tradition they named was already ancient, and nowhere more deeply rooted than in religious faith.