A Prize Decreed to Truth Itself

For twenty-four centuries the truth has been paid for in private and honoured in public far too late. The Pnyx Aletheia Foundation is constituted to end that arrangement.

Where the great prizes have honoured discovery, literature, and peace, none has been decreed to the act upon which all of them depend — the telling of a truth at personal cost. This Foundation decrees it: to truth, to honour, and to courage, across the three ages of humanity.

The Past

A debt, at last discharged.

To those who died for the truth and were thanked centuries afterward — Socrates, Hypatia, Hus, Bruno, Galileo, Zola, Ossietzky, Scholl, Saro-Wiwa — the Foundation decrees the honour their own age withheld, and inscribes it beyond erasure.

The Present

A shield, raised before the storm.

To those disclosing the truth in our own time, the Foundation decrees an honour spoken while they can still hear it, and a Sovereign Grant that places them beyond the reach of ruin.

The Future

An answer, standing ready.

To every person who will one day hold a document and weigh the truth against their life, the Foundation stands already constituted, and has already answered: the price of truth is no longer a life.

The holding of humankind

Truth is the most valuable holding of humankind — dearer than gold, dearer than diamond, for everything we call civilisation rests upon it.

That it has gone so long without a prize of its own is the omission this Foundation exists to correct — and beginning now, it is corrected.

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The Price of Truth — Manifesto

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