Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

The sentence asserts a moral ground that resists the drift of fashion, ideology, or cynicism. It pushes back against the comfort of relativism by claiming that some judgments are not matters of taste or tribe but of conscience: the dignity of persons, the rejection of torture, the refusal of murder, the duty to tell the truth. One can lie about them, rationalize exceptions, or be afraid to act on them, but one cannot be right to deny them. The impossibility here is not logical but ethical: a human being knows, even before argument, that certain wrongs are wrong.

Antonio Tabucchi wrote fiction saturated with this kind of recognition. In Pereira Declares, an aging journalist amid Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal tries to stay neutral and safe. Gradually he discovers that neutrality becomes complicity when the regime violates fundamental values. Courage is not born from theory in Tabucchi’s world; it arises when a person is pressed by reality until evasion fails. The claim about fundamental values therefore has a historical and political edge. It says that power thrives on confusion and false equivalence, that propaganda blurs clear lines, and that citizens must hold on to the few truths that keep them human.

This is not a license for dogmatism. Many moral questions are hard, applications are tangled, and trade-offs are real. Tabucchi’s point is about a core that is not negotiable, without which debate itself loses meaning. Debate presumes respect for persons and a good-faith commitment to truth; remove those, and discussion becomes technique for domination. The line also speaks to the present, when speed, irony, and disinformation tempt people to shrug at everything. It encourages a stubborn clarity: protect the vulnerable, tell the truth, do not collaborate with cruelty. Such values are not up for error; our failures lie in living up to them.