Daily Inspiration Quote by George Steiner

Language, for Steiner, is not an innocent medium you can rinse clean after history runs through it. The line lands like a moral diagnosis: once words have been used to authorize cruelty or to anesthetize the public with systematic lies, they don’t spring back into everyday speech as if nothing happened. They carry a residue. They flinch.

The verb choice matters. “Saturated” suggests total absorption, not a surface stain. This isn’t about a few bad actors misusing language; it’s about an environment where rhetoric is soaked through with propaganda, bureaucratic euphemism, and the cold efficiency of command. “Atrocity” sits beside “lies” to underline a continuum: deception isn’t merely adjacent to violence, it can be its precondition. Words don’t just describe what happens; they can make it administratively thinkable.

“Resume life” is the quiet knife twist. Steiner implies that words are living things in a culture: they circulate, breed meanings, build trust. When they’ve been pressed into service for terror - when “cleansing,” “solution,” “transport,” “security” have been made to mean their opposites - the social contract embedded in speech breaks. Even reclaimed terms can feel brittle, as if the language itself has learned fear.

Contextually, Steiner’s work is haunted by Europe after the Holocaust and by the broader question of how high culture and refined language coexisted with industrial slaughter. The subtext is accusatory: if we treat words as endlessly reusable, we make it easier for the next regime, the next “necessary” cruelty, to borrow the same verbal machinery.