"It is not every question that deserves an answer"
About this Quote
A good question can be a trap: a demand for attention dressed up as curiosity. Publilius Syrus, the Roman writer of sententiae (those sharp, portable moral one-liners), understands that refusing to answer is sometimes the only honest response. "It is not every question that deserves an answer" reads like etiquette, but it’s really a power move - a warning about who gets to set the terms of conversation.
In late Republican Rome, public life ran on performance: courts, politics, patronage, gossip. Questions weren’t neutral; they were often cross-examinations, loyalty tests, or invitations to incriminate yourself. Syrus’s line carries that streetwise Roman pragmatism: silence can be wisdom, self-preservation, even moral clarity. The subtext is that attention is a currency, and giving an answer is a form of payment. Some questions are asked in bad faith, to flatter the asker, to bait the respondent, to launder an accusation into “just asking.”
The quote also polices the boundary between knowledge and spectacle. It implies standards: a question should earn its answer by being sincere, relevant, and oriented toward truth rather than dominance. That’s why the sentence still lands in an era of viral gotchas and algorithmic discourse. Syrus isn’t advocating smug evasiveness; he’s naming a discipline most societies forget they need - the ability to withhold participation when the conversation is engineered to waste you.
In late Republican Rome, public life ran on performance: courts, politics, patronage, gossip. Questions weren’t neutral; they were often cross-examinations, loyalty tests, or invitations to incriminate yourself. Syrus’s line carries that streetwise Roman pragmatism: silence can be wisdom, self-preservation, even moral clarity. The subtext is that attention is a currency, and giving an answer is a form of payment. Some questions are asked in bad faith, to flatter the asker, to bait the respondent, to launder an accusation into “just asking.”
The quote also polices the boundary between knowledge and spectacle. It implies standards: a question should earn its answer by being sincere, relevant, and oriented toward truth rather than dominance. That’s why the sentence still lands in an era of viral gotchas and algorithmic discourse. Syrus isn’t advocating smug evasiveness; he’s naming a discipline most societies forget they need - the ability to withhold participation when the conversation is engineered to waste you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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