"Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price"
About this Quote
There is a quiet refusal embedded in Ben Jelloun's wording: intellectuals "try to keep going" as if survival, not prestige, is the job description. The sentence is built from small, plain verbs - try, keep, voice, paid - the kind of language you use when the stakes are real and the euphemisms have run out. In a handful of lines he sketches a social ecosystem where thought is not a salon activity but an endangered practice, tolerated until it stops being decorative.
The subtext is an indictment of regimes (and publics) that treat dissent as a contagion. "Their situation is very difficult" sounds mild, almost bureaucratic, but that's the point: understatement becomes a shield. Writers who live near the machinery of censorship learn to speak in calibrated tones, naming danger without offering the authorities a neat quote to prosecute. The phrase "those who have had the courage" draws an invisible line between private skepticism and public speech; it acknowledges how many people self-censor not because they're cowards, but because the consequences are designed to be exemplary.
Ben Jelloun, writing out of the postcolonial Francophone Maghreb and its long afterlife of surveillance, prison, and intimidation, understands that "a very high price" is not metaphorical. It's exile, professional erasure, harassment, and sometimes worse. The intent isn't to romanticize the intellectual as martyr; it's to make clear that the heroic pose is often forced on people who would prefer the ordinary freedom to think out loud.
The subtext is an indictment of regimes (and publics) that treat dissent as a contagion. "Their situation is very difficult" sounds mild, almost bureaucratic, but that's the point: understatement becomes a shield. Writers who live near the machinery of censorship learn to speak in calibrated tones, naming danger without offering the authorities a neat quote to prosecute. The phrase "those who have had the courage" draws an invisible line between private skepticism and public speech; it acknowledges how many people self-censor not because they're cowards, but because the consequences are designed to be exemplary.
Ben Jelloun, writing out of the postcolonial Francophone Maghreb and its long afterlife of surveillance, prison, and intimidation, understands that "a very high price" is not metaphorical. It's exile, professional erasure, harassment, and sometimes worse. The intent isn't to romanticize the intellectual as martyr; it's to make clear that the heroic pose is often forced on people who would prefer the ordinary freedom to think out loud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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