Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

Saul’s line is a tight little trap: it declares the collapse of absolutes, then immediately smuggles in two of its own. The first “exception” is the sentence you’re reading, a classic self-referential move that dares you to argue without stepping into its net. If you insist the statement is absolute, you’ve granted it authority; if you deny it, you’ve proved its point by turning the claim into something contingent. Saul isn’t just being clever for sport. He’s staging, in miniature, the predicament of modern public life: we talk like relativists, but we can’t function without some nonnegotiables.

The second exception, death, shifts the joke into a darker register. It’s the one certainty that cuts through ideology, branding, and opinion. Calling it “debatable” is the wink - a nod to religion, metaphysics, transhumanist fantasies, and the human habit of bargaining with the inevitable. The humor isn’t comforting; it’s diagnostic. We’re desperate to keep even the final fact on the table for negotiation.

Context matters: Saul has spent decades critiquing technocratic certainty and the managerial style of politics that treats complex societies like solvable equations. This epigram works because it needles both camps at once: the hardliners who demand absolute truth, and the poseurs who treat every claim as equally provisional. Its subtext is a warning against moral laziness masquerading as sophistication. If nothing is absolute, you still have to choose - and you still have to live with the consequences.