Meet Saadat Hasan Manto
Poise introduces the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto—celebrated for fearless, satirical treatment of social taboos in mid-twentieth-century India and Pakistan—through a curated selection of his most piercing quotes on religion, gender, inequality, and the writer's moral duty.
As writers, it is always a pleasure to share the works of other writers that have come before us, especially those whose hearts we write after; albeit in a different part of the world.
Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the greatest Indian writers of all time who wrote mainly in Urdu language. Manto was extremely popular because he writes about societal issues during in a time when no one dared to talk about them.
His writing was funny, satirical, blunt, and a window into the society in which he lived. He addressed issues like religion, sexism, politics, etc.
Here we are listing few famous Saadat Hasan Manto Quotes. Our favorite of these is N0.8. What's yours?
1. 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.
2. “...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.”
3. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing…. Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.
4. 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.
5. If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion?…Is love incomplete without it?…Is love the name of physical excercise?
6. I feel like I am always the one tearing everything up and forever sewing it back together.
7. He catches the thieves that lie in the hearts of their pure and respectable wives. And he compares them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel.
8. Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon.
9. You would have realized that it wasn’t Mumtaz, a Muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn’t have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn’t have killed his Muslimness, but him.
10. Her pores were like those of an orange, its skin filled with juice, which, if you applied the slightest pressure, would squirt up into your eyes. She was that fresh.
11. War has brought inflation even to the graveyard.
12. If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth.
13. For me, remembrance of things past has always been a waste of time, and what’s the point of tears? I don’t know. I’ve always been focused on today. Yesterday and tomorrow hold no interest for me. What had to happen, did, and what will happen, will.
14. “Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I'm denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.”
15. A man remains a man no matter how poor his conduct. A woman, even if she were to deviate for one instance, from the role given to her by men, is branded a whore.
16. “To tell you the truth, the world seemed full of sad people – those who slept on the uncovered stoops of shops as well as those who lived in high-rise mansions. The man who walks about on foot worries that he doesn’t have decent shoes to wear. The man who rides the automobile frets that he doesn’t have the latest model car. Every man’s complaint is valid in its own way. Every man’s wish is legitimate in its own right.”
Team Poise
This piece emerges from a moment when Poise was actively building a pan-Asian intellectual conversation, drawing readers' attention to writers whose unflinching social critique and literary craft offered both regional and universal resonance. Manto's work, controversial in his lifetime, had by 2019 achieved canonical status and broader English-language circulation.
Manto's uncompromising stance—that literature must expose society's naked truth rather than dress it—speaks directly to Poise's own editorial sensibility: dignified witness to what others leave unsaid. The quotes reveal a writer whose formal lightness (the watermelon kiss, the orange-skin metaphor) masked surgical precision about power, shame, and what it means to be human. His insistence that the writer is not a censor but a mirror remains vital for any serious literary voice navigating social constraint.