Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a principle: language wasn’t invented as camouflage. Coming from a novelist who made opacity, digression, and syntactic stubbornness into an art form, the statement carries a sly double edge. It reads less like naive faith in plain speech than like an accusation aimed at institutions that professionally fog the air: governments, churches, bureaucracies, even polite society. If words are meant to reveal, then the habitual misuse of language is not a quirk of style but a moral failure.

The subtext is about power. “Man” here isn’t humanity in the sentimental sense; it’s the speaking subject inside a hierarchy, always negotiating what can be said without consequence. Saramago, a Portuguese writer shaped by the long shadow of Salazar’s dictatorship and later by disillusionment with official narratives, knew how regimes train people to talk around reality. Euphemism becomes policy. Silence becomes safety. Under those conditions, concealment isn’t just lying; it’s a social technology.

What makes the sentence work is its blunt, almost biblical construction. It sounds like a foundational rule, the kind you’d carve into a courthouse wall, which is precisely why it stings: we all recognize the gap between the ideal and our practiced verbal evasions. The irony is that literature itself often traffics in indirection. Saramago’s wager is that art’s indirection can be revelatory, while public language’s indirection is usually self-serving. He’s drawing a line between complexity that clarifies and complexity that protects the powerful.