“Those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most will conquer”

“Those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most will conquer” is Terence MacSwiney’s formulation of suffering as a path to victory, and a defining statement of Irish republican martyrdom. The expression links the physical cost of resistance to a claim of moral and political power: those who endure state coercion may prevail not by inflicting greater harm, but by bearing more.

Wording and Origin

In 1920, MacSwiney, an Irish republican poet and politician, was imprisoned in Brixton Prison on sedition charges. He refused food for seventy-four days, demanding release; the British government did not release him, and he died. During this hunger strike he declared, ‘It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer.’ The wording in the book’s account differs slightly from the expression’s canonical form, but the central contrast is the same: suffering, rather than the capacity to inflict it, is presented as the basis of eventual conquest.

Martyrdom and Political Meaning

MacSwiney’s death sparked international protest. Before his burial in the uniform of the Irish Republican Army, tens of thousands filed past his coffin, while thousands more rallied in cities around the world. The coffin bore an inscription accusing a foreign power of murdering him in Brixton Prison. These circumstances made the expression more than a general maxim about endurance: it became attached to a particular death and to the contested question of who bore responsibility for it.

The account preserves that moral difficulty. In the strictest sense, MacSwiney chose to stop eating; yet he had said that he would eat again only if the British met his demands, placing the decision over his survival in the hands of his captors. The expression’s force rests in this tension between individual refusal and the power of the jailer. It presents suffering as politically consequential while making the conditions that produce it central to any judgment of the death.

Later Echo

The book subsequently describes the Price sisters’ hunger strike in prison. Officers initially left trays of food in their cells to tempt them, but the sisters did not touch it, and eventually the officers stopped bringing food. A Polish nurse continued to bring a jug of orange juice every morning. The account does not say that the sisters invoked MacSwiney’s expression; rather, their refusal appears after his story as a later instance of hunger strike and bodily endurance. That placement gives the expression a continuing context within republican prison resistance without turning the sisters’ actions into a direct quotation or claim of allegiance to his words.