I feel like I am always the one tearing everything up and forever sewing it back together.
Saadat Hasan MantoRead
If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores the uncomfortable truth of society and the role of artists in revealing its flaws.
Saadat Hasan Manto's quote reflects on the challenging nature of confronting societal issues. He suggests that if one cannot endure the harsh realities and stories of society, then they contribute to an unbearable environment. Manto highlights his role as a storyteller who exposes the naked truths of society, asserting that it is not his responsibility to disguise these truths, as that task belongs to those who create societal norms and appearances.
Themes
SocietyTruthStoriesArtRealityExposure
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the role of art in social commentary.
More from Saadat Hasan Manto
All quotes →Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
Saadat Hasan MantoRead
But love, whether in Multan or on Siberia's icy tundra, whether in the winter or the summer, whether among the rich or the poor, whether among the beautiful or the ugly, whether among the crude or refined, love is always just love. There's no difference.
Saadat Hasan MantoRead
If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth
Saadat Hasan MantoRead
Similar quotes
The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
Marguerite YourcenarRead
The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice in diverse countries - Rwanda, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, Australia and Norway - it forces us to face the reality that American-style punishment has been chosen.
Michelle AlexanderRead
Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?
SophoclesRead
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
Thomas MannRead
One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.
E. M. ForsterRead
Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.
Sherwin B. NulandRead