The Truth Will Prevail

真理は勝つ (shinri wa katsu): truth prevails, truth wins in the end. 真理 shinri is truth in the philosopher's sense, truth as a principle, a larger word than 本当; は marks it as the topic; 勝つ katsu is to win. The sentence belongs to more than one tradition. It is the Mundaka Upanishad's the true prevails, not the untrue, which India took as its national motto, and it is the Czech pravda vítězí, on the president's flag since 1920, a line the Czechs trace through Jan Hus to the apocryphal Third Book of Ezra. In Japanese it has a life of its own: a 1914 translation of Windelband's history of philosophy has truth winning at the Copernican turn, and in a 1924 school anniversary volume a graduate makes it his maxim, sincerity is truth, and truth prevails.