Life & Wisdom Quote by Jaroslav Seifert

Silence is usually marketed as virtue: restraint, tact, the noble refusal to add noise. Seifert punctures that halo with a poet's suspicion that language is not just a tool but a duty. His split between the "ordinary person" and the writer is less elitism than job description. For most people, silence can be strategy, self-protection, even kindness. For a writer, silence becomes a kind of fraud because the writer's social contract is to witness, to name, to translate the unsayable into public speech.

The sting is in "lying". Seifert isn't accusing writers of literal falsehood; he's calling out the lie of omission that happens when someone who can speak chooses not to. It reframes reticence as complicity. If you have the craft to make reality legible and you withhold it, you're not neutral. You're manufacturing a cleaner narrative by leaving out what hurts.

The context matters: Seifert lived through the rise of totalitarian power in Czechoslovakia, Nazi occupation, then decades of Communist control, with censorship and coercion shaping what could be published and what had to be coded. In that environment, silence wasn't a personality trait; it was an outcome the state worked to produce. The line reads like a private ethic sharpened into a public accusation: writers who retreat into tasteful ambiguity may be protecting themselves, but they're also helping the regime by letting official lies stand uncontested.

Seifert's provocation lands because it denies artists the refuge of being "above politics". For him, the pen is an alarm, not an accessory.