‘I loved you then, but at that point we diverged.

“No”, I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” You retorted: “Well, you just don’t love your country.”

…

We had much to overcome, first of all, the constant temptation to emulate you. For there is always something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efficiency. Our great virtues eventually become tiresome to us. We become ashamed of our intelligence, and sometimes we imagine some barbarous state where truth would be effortless. But the cure for this is easy; you are there to show us what such imagining would lead to, and we mend our ways…

…I know, you think that heroism is alien to us. You are wrong. It’s just that we avow heroism and are wary of it at the same time. We avow it because ten centuries of history have given us knowledge of all that is noble. We are wary of it because ten centuries of intelligence have taught us the art and beneficence of nature. In order to face you, we had to first come back from the brink…

…Now we have done that. We had to take a long detour and we are far behind. It is a detour that the regard for truth imposes on intelligence, the regard for friendship at its core. It is a detour that safeguarded justice and put truth on the side of those who questioned themselves. And, without a doubt, we paid very dearly for it. We paid for it with humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions, with separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and, above all, with forced repentance. But that’s the way things go. It took us all that time to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the atrocious misery of this world…

…Finally, to possess ourselves of the spirit, we had to endure the torture of our flesh. We paid dearly and we will have more to pay. However, we have our convictions, our reasoning, our justice: your defeat is inevitable…

 ….I have never believed in the power of truth alone. But it is worth knowing that when given equal energy, truth wins out over falsehood. It is at this difficult equilibrium that we have arrived. It is bolstered by this nuance that today we fight. And I would be tempted to tell you that we are fighting for fine distinctions, but distinctions that are as important as man himself. We are fighting for this nuance that separates sacrifice from mysticism, energy from violence, strength from cruelty, for this feeble distinction that separates the false from the true, and the man we hope for from the cowardly gods you revere.”

-Albert Camus, Excerpts from Letters to a German Friend (First Letter) - 1943