Never Give Up

決して諦めない (kesshite akiramenai): never give up. 決して kesshite with a negative is never; 諦めない akiramenai is the negative of 諦める akirameru, to give up, to stop because one sees no hope, a verb with a Buddhist shade, since 諦 is to see a thing clearly and let it go; cited from a puppet play of 1693. The English is the motto's smoothing of Churchill's Harrow speech of October 1941, never give in, never, never, never, which went on except to convictions of honour and good sense, a clause the motto drops. The Japanese was in print in 1922, in a translation of Maeterlinck, of a devotion that will never give up: a plain sentence, spoken in Japanese before the English.