All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man’s conscience.

The line comes from Swift’s satirical travel narrative *Gulliver’s Travels*, in the Lilliput episodes where a petty religious-political schism divides the nation into “Big-Endians” and “Little-Endians” over which end of a boiled egg should be broken. Swift frames the dispute as having originated in an imperial edict after the emperor’s ancestor cut his finger breaking an egg at the “large end,” prompting a law mandating the “small end.” The quoted sentence is voiced as a purportedly moderate position—break eggs at the “convenient end”—but it is embedded in a context of persecution, rebellion, and factional propaganda, parodying how trivial doctrinal differences can be inflated into violent ideological conflict.

The line satirizes religious and political dogmatism by reducing sectarian conflict to an absurd dispute over which end of a boiled egg should be broken. By proposing that “the convenient end” be left to individual conscience, the speaker gestures toward toleration and private judgment, implicitly mocking authorities who legislate trivialities as matters of salvation. The humor depends on Swift’s broader technique of defamiliarization: by translating real-world confessional and ideological divisions into a petty culinary rule, he exposes how power can inflate minor differences into causes for persecution and war. The phrase also hints at pragmatic moderation—“convenient” rather than “correct”—as an antidote to fanaticism.