Time & Perspective Quote by Dario Fo

"Know how to live the time that is given you" lands like a stage direction disguised as advice: stop waiting for a better script. Coming from Dario Fo, it’s not a soft self-help murmur; it’s a political dare. Fo built his career exposing how power manufactures passivity - through bureaucracy, churchly authority, media spin, and the comforting myth that ordinary people are too small to matter. In that world, time isn’t just personal; it’s the raw material institutions steal, ration, and sell back as permission.

The verb "know" is the tell. Fo isn’t asking you to feel your way through life; he’s pushing a kind of learned cunning, the streetwise intelligence of the commedia tradition he revived. To "live" the time given implies time arrives pre-packaged by circumstances: class, censorship, economic precarity, the constant emergency of public life. The subtext is unsentimental: you don’t get to choose the era, the rules, or the mess, but you can choose whether you become its willing extra.

Context matters because Fo’s Italy was defined by ideological conflict, corruption scandals, and violence - years when speaking plainly could cost you, and performance became a survival tool. The line reads as an antidote to fatalism and nostalgia alike. Not "make the most of your time" (a bourgeois slogan), but master the conditions you’ve inherited, find the loopholes, and act anyway. It’s a compact manifesto for living as a citizen rather than a spectator.