Life & Wisdom Quote by Dylan Thomas

Posterity is usually hauled onstage as a hostage: behave, sacrifice, tighten your belt, because “history will judge” and the unborn are counting on you. Dylan Thomas snaps that moral blackmail in half. “The function of posterity is to look after itself” is a poet’s refusal to let imagined future audiences run the present like a stern accountant. He turns posterity from a sacred tribunal into a practical organism with its own survival instinct. The future doesn’t need our pieties nearly as much as it needs our honesty.

The line also reads like self-defense from the dead weight of legacy. Thomas, writing in the shadow of world war and living with a famously self-destructive intensity, had reason to distrust tidy narratives of responsibility and redemption. Posterity, in his view, is not a grateful child; it’s an opportunistic editor. It will cherry-pick, misread, mythologize, and domesticate you after you’re gone. So why let it police your art now?

There’s a sly insult embedded here: posterity is not fragile. We flatter ourselves when we imagine the future as dependent on our virtue. Thomas suggests the opposite - the future will adapt, revise, and carry on, often without asking permission. That’s bracing, even liberating: it clears space for living urgently, writing fiercely, and making choices that answer to the present tense, not to some imagined committee of descendants polishing your plaque.