Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

Perfection is Tabucchi’s booby-trapped word: it sounds like self-improvement and ends in state violence. In one clean line, he reframes “the best” as a political hazard, a craving that doesn’t stop at tidier sentences or more disciplined lives but metastasizes into systems that demand unanimity. The verb “spawns” matters. Perfection doesn’t merely “lead to” bad outcomes; it reproduces them, as if the impulse is fertile, automatic, almost biological. Once you accept that an ideal final form exists, you invite the machinery designed to force reality to match it.

Tabucchi, a novelist steeped in Portugal’s Salazar era and European memory of fascism and communism, is writing with an archivist’s suspicion of grand designs. Doctrines come first: neat explanations that reduce human messiness to a plan. Dictators follow: the person who claims special access to the plan. “Totalitarian ideas” completes the escalation, suggesting that repression starts upstream, in the imagination, before it shows up in police files. The line quietly accuses intellectual life, too: perfection isn’t only a tyrant’s fantasy but a thinker’s temptation, the desire to close the argument, to eliminate contradiction.

The subtext is an argument for imperfection as civic virtue. Pluralism, compromise, even boredom are protections against purity. Tabucchi’s warning isn’t that ideals are useless; it’s that when an ideal becomes perfect, it becomes non-negotiable. And anything non-negotiable eventually demands an enforcer.