At Omaha Beach, during the commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in France, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaned down to chat with an American World War II veteran sitting in a wheelchair.They exchanged a few words, then Trudeau introduced the man, ninety-nine-year-old Melvin Hurwitz, who was an Air Force B-17 radio gunner on June 6, 1944, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They shook hands. When Hurwitz tried to kiss the president’s hand, Zelenskyy quickly pulled it back, and the two men embraced instead. “You’re the savior of the people,” Hurwitz told Zelenskyy, whose country had been fighting to preserve its freedom since February 24, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion. “No, no, no,” Zelenskyy protested, “you saved Europe.”
.
Hurwitz asked for a picture, so Zelenskyy knelt beside his wheelchair. The audience at Omaha Beach, who had been watching the scene live on video, began applauding. “You’re our hero,” Hurwitz said to Zelenskyy, who replied, “No, you are our hero.” Shortly after the emotional encounter, the content creators who manage @Ukraine, the Ukrainian government’s official X account, posted the video along with a defiant one-sentence rallying cry: “We kneel before heroes, not invaders.”
Dissidents, social critics, freedom fighters, and activists have long used aphorisms to speak truth to power. Now, as culture becomes more visual and as those visuals become more easily distributed via social media, memes have emerged as the latest iteration of the aphoristic form.In today’s extremely online environment, meme makers post funny, fawning, provocative, stupid, and sarcastic images and videos, even as the news events to which they refer are still happening.
Memes and social media posts share some similarities with aphorisms—they’re delivered in short bursts, opinionated, and often heavy on spin—but brevity is the only one of the aphorism’s five laws with which they really comply. TikTok videos can be fun or infuriating, but there’s rarely anything philosophical about them. And while social media posts are frequently definitive (the political ones, anyway), they often get their message across in a shrill, dogmatic, and partisan way that is extremely unaphoristic. Most memes are not aphorisms, for the same reason that most inspirational quotes plastered across photos of misty landscapes are not. Strident online screeds aren’t aphorisms, either.
Some memes, though, like the Hurwitz–Zelenskyy clip, which went viral in June 2024, do achieve aphorism status. Take the murals of George Floyd that have appeared around the world since his May 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer. The murals are brief, just portraits with the quote “I can’t breathe.” They are definitive as powerful statements of resistance against police violence. They are personal, not in terms of the identities of the artists but in terms of the identities of the Black men—including Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, among many others—who have died as a result of encounters with law enforcement. They have a twist, transforming the last words of a dying man into an affirmation of lives that matter. And they are philosophical, protesting America’s long history of racism and demanding its long-delayed promise of racial justice.
Aphorisms have always gone viral, from the oral culture of the ancient world to the visual culture of today. That’s why the words of Heraclitus and Lao-tzu still circulate thousands of years after they were first written down. Memes present the aphorism in a new form and through a new medium, but the message hasn’t changed. The aphorism—whether visual, verbal, or some combination of the two—is now and always has been a manifesto in miniature.
…
Aphorisms are still as vibrant and alive in today’s digital world as they were back in Heraclitus and Lao-tzu’s analog age. Meme makers like the @Ukraine team, George Floyd muralists, and other visual artists and wordsmiths taking the aphorism online offer the opposite of the thoughtterminating cliché. They broaden our capacities for thinking and feeling by creating thought-generating images and wordplay. In a world of disinformation and deepfakes, the aphorism still speaks to the power of fresh debate over tired dogma and of inconvenient truths over comfortable lies.
(Excerpted with permission from The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (Second Edition) by James Geary, published by University of Chicago Press; 2025)
