Life & Wisdom Quote by Dante Alighieri

A line like this is Dante at his most surgical: a moral accounting rendered in a single, withheld detail. “No one” is the indictment. It’s not aimed at tyrants or monsters; it’s aimed at the ordinary beneficiaries of order, peace, spectacle, and salvation who prefer their outcomes laundered of their price. The phrase “thinks of” matters too. Dante isn’t accusing people only of cruelty, but of a cultivated inattentiveness - the easy, socially rewarded habit of letting blood become background.

The subtext is political as much as spiritual. Medieval Florence ran on factional violence and public piety, a city where ideals were preached with one hand and enforced with the other. Dante, exiled and embittered, understood how institutions justify brutality by outsourcing it: soldiers, executioners, crusaders, the faceless machinery that makes violence seem inevitable rather than chosen. “Costs” turns blood into currency. Pain becomes the hidden tax that buys stability, virtue, even art. The line compresses a whole civic hypocrisy: everyone wants the clean ledger, no one wants the receipts.

Contextually, Dante’s larger project in the Comedy is to make consequences visible. Hell is not just punishment; it’s a disclosure system, a refusal of euphemism. This sentence operates like a spotlight swung onto the audience. The poem may be full of sinners, but the real target is the living reader’s comfort - the desire to enjoy moral narratives without acknowledging the bodies piled beneath them.