Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

The sting in Saramago's line is that it refuses the comforting excuse of ignorance. "Blind people who can see" is an accusation aimed at those with functioning eyes and dulled moral attention: citizens, neighbors, institutions that register reality but decline to recognize it. He turns blindness from a medical condition into a civic choice, a failure of perception that is also a failure of responsibility.

The sentence works because of its built-in contradiction. Seeing is reduced to a mechanical act, like a camera recording footage no one watches. "Do not see" shifts the burden from capacity to will. It's not that the world is unknowable; it's that we are practiced at not knowing it. Saramago's dry, almost clinical phrasing intensifies the cruelty: no poetic flourish, just a diagnosis.

Context matters. Saramago wrote as a novelist shaped by dictatorship, censorship, and the long hangover of authoritarian habits in Portugal, then later as a public intellectual skeptical of capitalism, church power, and political complacency. In Blindness (his most famous staging of this idea), a society collapses when literal sight disappears; here, he implies the collapse has already begun, because the deeper blindness predates the epidemic.

Subtext: complicity. The line gestures at how cruelty and inequality persist less through dramatic villains than through everyday non-recognition. People "can see" suffering, corruption, the slow grinding of systems, yet treat it as background noise. Saramago isn't describing a lack of information; he's indicting an ethic of looking away.