Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

“Insolent haughtiness” lands like a slap because Saramago gives arrogance both a sneer and a posture: it’s not merely ignorance, it’s ignorance with swagger. The line is built to indict a habit of power masquerading as personality. “Attitude” makes it behavioral, almost casual; “characteristic” makes it systemic. He’s not diagnosing a few bad actors, he’s describing a national reflex that presents itself as normal.

The target is “relationships,” not policy. That shift matters. Saramago is pointing to the everyday micro-diplomacy of empire: how a dominant culture meets the unfamiliar with a confidence that assumes it will be accommodated. “What is alien” is deliberately broad - immigrants, foreign governments, other languages, other histories - but the phrasing also suggests a failure of imagination. The “alien” isn’t inherently strange; it’s rendered strange by the American gaze. He’s critiquing a worldview that turns difference into a test of loyalty or usefulness.

As a novelist who watched the 20th century’s ideological wreckage and the late century’s American ascendancy, Saramago is writing from the outside of the superpower’s self-mythology. The subtext is that soft power works not only through Hollywood and markets, but through a tone: the assumption that the rest of the world is a backdrop, an audience, or a problem to be managed. The insult in the sentence is strategic. It refuses to flatter American self-conceptions of openness, forcing readers to confront how often “curiosity” is performed as domination with better branding.