A country where those who speak are hanged (by L. Euler)

The great Leonhard Euler spent his scientific life between the academies of science in St. Petersburg and Berlin. He was in St. Petersburg from 1727 to 1741, and then from 1766 until his death in 1783. In between, from 1741 to 1766 he was at the Berlin Academy. He came to Berlin to escape the instability in Russia after the death of Catherine I (the widow of Tsar Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg), at a time when purges became frequent. Frederick of Prussia, who liked to surround himself with learned scholars and who enjoyed meeting and discussing with people of high spirit, attracted Euler to his Academy on the recommendation of D’Alembert. But the king preferred philosophers of brilliant conversation like Voltaire to mathematicians, especially if the latter were shy. From his time in Russia, Euler had learned to be prudent and quiet; asked on one occasion about his shyness, he replied:

It is because I come from a country where, whoever speaks, is hanged.

You see, things don’t seem to have changed much in Eastern Europe, except that there is now a whole arsenal of atomic weapons involved.