Below is one of the Russian sayings shared by Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev, co-authors of How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America, during our Boston Book Festival panel on October 17:

We thought we hit rock bottom, but then we heard knocking from below.

Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev shared the stage with me and James Romm, author of Since You’re Mortal ... Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays, who shared this millennia-old observation on happiness:

The truly happy man ought to stay at home.

The BBF panel, moderated by Martin Puchner, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard, was about "how language shapes our world," and aphorisms featured prominently in the discussion. How to Survive Authoritarianism is an irreverent lexicon of 100 Russian terms providing a vocabulary to recognize and resist tyranny, and Since You’re Mortal ... is a compendium of quotes from the lost plays of ancient Athens compiled in the fifth century by Stobaeus as a way to instruct his son.

The practice of compiling moral instruction manuals for (male) children started in ancient Egypt c. 3000 BCE with The Instructions of Ptah-Hotep. These aphoristic handbooks usually take the form of brief dicta in which a father passes on lessons to his son, including, in Ptah-Hotep's case, this counter-intuitive take on governing:

He that obeys becomes one obeyed.

The dark humor of Russian sayings is characteristic of so many political aphorisms from the Central and Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet Union, most notably by Stanislaw Lec, a Polish dissident writing during the 1950s and '60s:

Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.

Many thanks to the wonderful team at the Boston Book Festival for having us and to everyone who came out to ponder how language shapes our world.