Daily Inspiration Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz lands a blade on both sides of the argument and leaves it there, daring you to grab it. “Society has a right to defend itself” sounds like the kind of maxim regimes carve into courthouse walls: order, stability, the collective good. Then he flips the sentence and gives equal moral standing to “the individual” who “has the right to attack” what he rejects. Not debate, not petition, not polite dissent: attack. The provocation is deliberate. Mahfouz is sketching a permanent tension, not offering a tidy rule.

The intent is less to license violence than to expose the hypocrisy that often hides behind “defense.” States love the vocabulary of self-protection because it frames coercion as necessity. Mahfouz insists that dissent also has a self-defense logic: when institutions harden into dogma, refusal becomes a form of civic respiration. The subtext is that both impulses can be abused. Society can “defend itself” into censorship and prisons; the individual can “attack” into fanaticism and terror. By granting symmetry, he forces readers to confront how quickly each side claims legitimacy.

Context matters: Mahfouz wrote within Egypt’s shifting 20th-century landscape, where political crackdowns, ideological movements, and religious pressures all competed to define public morality. He was attacked, literally, for fiction seen as blasphemous. That biography gives the line its bite: it’s a novelist’s argument that social peace isn’t the absence of conflict, it’s the management of it - and that any society demanding absolute safety from disagreement is really demanding obedience.