Daily Inspiration Quote by Hector Hugh Munro

A good address is supposed to pin you to a map; Saki’s joke is that it’s really a fig leaf. “Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts” flips a civic convenience into a social weapon, and the inversion is the whole trick. The line is built on the smug promise of modern order - street numbers, directories, postal systems, the neat legibility of a bureaucratic age - and then quietly suggests that this legibility is theater. You can be locatable and still unreachable. You can be “at home” and unavailable.

The subtext is classed and sharp-edged. In Saki’s Edwardian world, privacy isn’t just solitude; it’s privilege. The people who most insist on correct forms, correct calling cards, correct addresses are often the ones most practiced at evasion: not returning visits, dodging obligations, being “out” while technically in. An address becomes a sanctioned alibi, a prop that lets society run its rituals without forcing sincerity.

There’s also an early-modern paranoia in the humor: the state and the city are learning how to catalogue you, but the individual keeps finding loopholes. Saki doesn’t romanticize resistance; he needles the hypocrisy of polite life, where communication systems multiply while genuine access shrinks. The wit lands because it names a contemporary feeling: the more infrastructure we build to connect ourselves, the more sophisticated our excuses for not being found.