In this joint work with P. Souplet we develop a new, unified approach to the following two classical questions on elliptic PDE:

(i) the strong maximum principle for equations with non-Lipschitz nonlinearities; and

(ii) the at most exponential decay of solutions in the whole space or exterior domains.

Our results apply to divergence and nondivergence operators with locally unbounded lower-order coefficients, in a number of situations where all previous results required bounded ingredients. Our approach, which allows for relatively simple and short proofs, is based on a (weak) Harnack inequality with optimal dependence of the constants in the lower-order terms of the equation and the size of the domain, which we establish.