One has to multiply thoughts to the point where there aren’t enough policemen to control them.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909–1966) was a Polish satirist and aphorist whose writing was shaped by the catastrophes and coercions of mid‑20th‑century Europe—war, totalitarianism, censorship, and the policing of speech and thought. The line fits the political edge of his best-known work, a collection of paradoxical, anti-authoritarian aphorisms that circulated widely in postwar Poland and beyond. In that milieu, “policemen” evokes not only literal police but also the broader apparatus of surveillance and ideological control. Lec’s aphorisms often propose intellectual resistance: multiplying independent thoughts until repression becomes impracticable.

The aphorism argues that the most effective antidote to repression is not a single “correct” idea but an abundance of free, proliferating thought. “Policemen” stands for any force that tries to regulate consciousness—state censorship, social conformity, or internalized self-censorship. By urging us to “multiply thoughts,” Lec suggests that pluralism and creativity overwhelm systems built to monitor and discipline: control depends on scarcity and predictability, while a swarm of ideas creates ungovernable complexity. The line also implies a moral imperative: intellectual life should be expansive enough that no authority can fully patrol it, making freedom a function of imaginative and critical excess.