Don't let the bastards grind you down.

The line is widely associated with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel *The Handmaid’s Tale* (1985). In the book, the protagonist Offred encounters the pseudo-Latin phrase “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” scratched in her room by a previous Handmaid, and later learns it is intended to mean “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” The message functions as a covert act of solidarity and resistance within the theocratic regime of Gilead, where women are systematically controlled and stripped of autonomy. The English rendering has since circulated as a feminist and political slogan beyond the novel’s original context.

The quote is a defiant injunction to preserve inner agency under oppressive power. “Bastards” stands in for entrenched authorities who demean, exhaust, or intimidate; “grind you down” evokes the slow, cumulative erosion of selfhood rather than a single dramatic blow. In *The Handmaid’s Tale*, its force lies in being both intimate and clandestine: a private reminder that resistance can begin as psychological refusal to internalize domination. More broadly, the phrase endures because it compresses resilience into a blunt, memorable imperative—urging persistence, self-respect, and moral stamina when institutions or individuals attempt to reduce a person to compliance.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.