Seeing

by José Saramago

but faith, may it be eternally blessed, as well as removing mountains from the path of those who benefit from its influence, is capable of plunging into the most torrential of waters and emerging from them bone-dry.

The ways of warding off fate are many and almost all are useless, and this one, forcing oneself to think the worst in the hope that the best will happen, is one of the most commonplace,

Those who argue thus are forgetting that not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding,

The genetic code of what, somewhat unthinkingly, we have been content to call human nature, cannot be reduced to the organic helix of deoxyribonucleic acid, or dna, there is much more to be said about it and it has much more to tell us, but human nature is, figuratively speaking, the complementary spiral that we have not yet managed to prise out of kindergarten, despite the multitude of psychologists and analysts from the most diverse schools and with the most diverse abilities who have broken their nails trying to draw its bolts.

Give us another answer, that one won’t do, It’s the only answer I can give because it’s the true one, That’s what you think, Unless you want me to make one up, Yes, do, we don’t mind at all if you come up with answers which, with time and patience, could be made to fit the proper application of certain techniques, that way, you’ll end up saying what we want to hear, Tell me what the answer is then, and let’s be done with it, Oh, no, that wouldn’t be any fun at all, who do you think we are, sir, we have our scientific dignity to consider, our professional conscience to defend, it’s very important to us that we should be able to demonstrate to our superiors that we deserve the money they pay us and the bread that we eat, Sorry, you’ve lost me, Don’t be in such a hurry.

that is the great thing about ordinary words, they are incapable of deceit.

it was arrant nonsense to take away the rights of someone whose only crime had been to exercise one of those rights.

There were also people who just turned off the television as soon as the prime minister had finished speaking and, before going to bed, sat around talking about their lives, and there were others who spent the rest of the evening tearing up and burning papers. They weren’t conspirators, they were simply afraid.

that censorship proper is like the sun, which, when it rises, rises for everyone,

Hope is like salt, there’s no nourishment in it, but it gives the bread its savor,

Let’s go back to salt and hope again, how much would you have to add before the thing you were hoping for became inedible,

human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

One can, if the circumstances are favorable, survive one lie, but not two.

and within every human truth there is always an element of anxiety or conflict, we are, and I am not referring simply to the fragility of life, we are a small, tremulous flame which threatens at any moment to go out, and we are afraid, above all, we are afraid,

for, since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding the proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that they had failed even to notice that those rights had been suspended.

Very simple, that right exists potentially in the duty of others to respect and comply with it,

for, as it is always wise to remember, while it is true that man proposes, it is god who disposes, and there have been very few occasions, almost all of them tragic, when both man and god were in agreement and did all the disposing together.

All your suffering will have been futile, all your stubbornness in vain, and then you will understand, too late, that rights only exist fully in the words in which they are expressed and on the piece of paper on which they are recorded, whether in the form of a constitution, a law or a regulation, you will understand and, one hopes, be convinced, that their wrong or unthinking application will convulse the most firmly established society, you will understand, at last, that simple common sense tells us to take them as a mere symbol of what could be, but never as a possible, concrete reality.

Allow me to say that in a situation like this, a government doesn’t govern, it just looks as if it were governing,

My dear fellow, when situations become as complicated and as desperate as this, we tend to grab hold of anything,

The devil has such good hearing he doesn’t need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There’s no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf.

Put less respectfully, these men and these women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.

It’s odd how we spend every day of our life saying goodbye, saying and hearing others say see you tomorrow when, inevitably, on one of those days, which will be someone’s last, either the person we said it to will no longer be here, or we who said it will not. We will see if on today’s tomorrow, what we normally refer to as the following day, when the council leader and his chauffeur meet again, they will be capable of grasping what an extraordinary, near-miraculous thing it is to have said see you tomorrow and to find that what had been no more than a problematic possibility has come to pass as if it had been a certainty.

It is an unvarying rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start to think, afterward, it might be too late.

From what I know about what goes on in people’s minds, I would say that it’s your conscience that’s troubling you, For something I didn’t do, Some people say that’s the worst kind of remorse, for something you allowed to happen,

May I remind you that he who wills the ends, wills the means,

You know better than anyone that no interior minister, in any age or in any country in the world, has ever opened his mouth to speak of the mean, dishonorable, treacherous, criminal deeds committed in the course of his work, so you can rest easy on that score because I will prove no exception,

demonstrations never achieve anything, if they did, we wouldn’t allow them,

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

This peaceful demonstration did what the bomb had failed to do.

however, in my view, complete containment can only be achieved by the construction of a wall around the capital, an impassable wall made out of concrete slabs, and, I would say, about eight meters high, using, of course, the system of electronic sensors already in existence and backed up by as many barbed-wire fences as are judged to be necessary, I am firmly convinced that no one would manage to get past that, not even, I would say, a fly, if you’ll allow me my little joke, but not so much because flies couldn’t get through it, as because, as far as one can judge from their normal behavior, they have no reason to fly that high.

TRUMP

we have no option but to recognize that all our attempts to make the rebels listen to reason have, each and every one, been a resounding failure, and that the cause of that failure, at least in my opinion, could well have been the severity of the repressive measures we chose to use, and secondly, if we continue with the strategy we have followed up until now, if we continue with the escalation of coercive methods, and if the response of the rebels also continues to be what it has been up until now, which is to say no response at all, we will be forced to resort to drastic measures of a dictatorial nature, such as the indefinite withdrawal of civil rights from the city’s population, which, to avoid ideological favoritism, would have to include our own voters too, or, with the aim of preventing the spread of the epidemic, the passing of an emergency electoral law that would apply to the whole country and would make blank votes void, and so on.

Contradictory - think more oppression will fix it

Changing the position of words often changes their meaning, but they, the words, when weighed one by one, continue physically,

would just mention that my ministry has its own team of writers, people highly trained in the art of persuasion, which, as I understand it, writers normally achieve only briefly and after much effort,

with words crossed out and replaced by others that would immediately suffer the same fate, with phrases which, shorn of what went before, no longer fitted what came after, so much wasted ink, so much torn-up paper, this, we will have you know, is what is meant by the torment of writing, the torture of creation.

the safest way of categorizing people is not by dividing them up into the stupid and the clever, but into the clever and the too clever, with the stupid, we can do what we like, with the clever, the trick is to get them on our side, whereas the too clever, even when they’re on our side, are still intrinsically dangerous, they can’t help it,

just as the wrong side and the right side of things are, quite naturally, always found together.

it is these small cracks in the varnish of behavior, rather than noisy revolutions, which, slowly, through repetition and persistence, finally bring down the most solid of social edifices.

Nowadays, having abandoned their blind obedience to the lord’s orders, lightning bolts fall only where they want to, and, as has become manifest, one can clearly not count on them to lead this sinful city and caster of blank votes back to the path of righteousness.

Knowledge on its own isn’t always enough, whereas with luck and time you can achieve almost anything,

There are no innocent people, even when not guilty of an actual crime, we are all unfailingly guilty of some fault,

What will happen if no proof of guilt is found, The same as would happen if no proof of innocence were found, How should I understand that, albatross, That there are cases when the sentence has been handed down before the crime has even been committed,

Hmmmm

time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat,

Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

but then since when has reason ruled human decisions, not an easy question to answer, but it’s always better to have one oar than none,

But it’s not only when we have no eyes that we don’t know where we’re going, he thought.

As I’ve learned in this job, not only are the people in government never put off by what we judge to be absurd, they make use of absurdities to dull consciences and to destroy reason,

We are born, and at that moment, it is as if we had signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf,

one must always take great care with what one thinks one knows, because behind it one finds concealed an endless chain of unknowns,

That’s just your impression, you’re talking to a policeman, remember, Oh, I haven’t forgotten, but the truth is that I no longer think of you as one,

Hes broken out of the system