Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

The line lands like a moral heckle aimed at modernity’s favorite alibi: progress. Saramago sets up a brag - “machines to Mars” - then yanks the floor out with a blunt comparison: we can solve the hard, glamorous problems, yet we refuse the basic, unglamorous one. The rhetorical question is doing double duty. It’s accusation, but it’s also a diagnosis of a culture that treats technical prowess as virtue in itself, as if engineering could substitute for ethics.

The subtext is not anti-science; it’s anti-self-congratulation. “Machines” are deliberately impersonal. They don’t bleed, don’t vote, don’t complicate budgets. Sending them to Mars is a clean triumph, a televised achievement with no funerals attached. “The killing of a human being” is phrased in the singular, which makes the indictment sharper: not genocide in the abstract, not a distant war statistic, but one life - the minimum unit of moral responsibility. If we can’t protect even that, what exactly is our civilization for?

Context matters: Saramago, a Portuguese novelist steeped in allegory and political critique, spent his career interrogating institutional cruelty and collective numbness. This is the same worldview that animates Blindness: societies don’t collapse because they lack technology; they collapse because they outsource conscience. The quote weaponizes contrast to expose a modern pathology - our capacity to marvel is intact, our capacity to intervene is optional.