Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

The brutality of Vanunu's line is how small it makes a massive political machine feel: "not allowed" repeated like a child reciting rules, then punctured by the almost absurdly mild "So I'm not so happy". It lands because the emotional register is deliberately understated. He isn't performing martyrdom or issuing grand denunciations; he's describing a life reduced to permissions. That flatness is the point. When a state controls your movement and your speech, even your vocabulary starts to shrink.

The specific intent is both personal and tactical. Vanunu frames his condition in plain terms a non-specialist can grasp: you don't need to understand nuclear policy to understand a gag order and a locked border. That accessibility is a form of counterpower, translating national-security abstraction into everyday captivity. The phrase "foreigners" is especially telling: it implies the state isn't just restricting travel, it's policing contact, treating conversation itself as contraband.

The subtext is an accusation wrapped in resignation. By stacking two prohibitions and ending with a muted complaint, he exposes a regime that prefers administrative containment over public argument. It's the language of bureaucratic coercion echoed back to the bureaucracy, stripped of legal justifications and left as naked control.

Context sharpens the edge. Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed details of Israel's nuclear program to the foreign press in the 1980s, served a long prison sentence and then faced severe restrictions after release. His "not so happy" isn't small; it's a dark, dry measure of how democracies can borrow the tools of authoritarianism when secrecy is at stake.