If the internet has given us anything in abundance, it is not truth, but quotation—adrift, unmoored, and often falsely anchored to great names. In that vast digital commons where aphorisms circulate like loose currency, authenticity dissolves into repetition, and repetition becomes a kind of belief. Out of this quiet erosion, a new canon emerges—not of verified voices, but of phrases that endure because they seem to capture, in their solemn brevity, the pulse of an age. It is in this spirit that two such misattributed lines came to mind as I tried to understand our present political moment—more precisely, what appears to be a troubling loss of rhetorical restraint in the recent public statements of the President of the Regional Government, as surprising as they are disquieting.

It is said—though perhaps never truly said—that Jean-Paul Sartre once warned: “When politicians play with chaos, chaos learns to play with them.” Whether or not the philosopher ever uttered these words is, in a sense, beside the point. The idea itself stands as caution: those who handle volatile concepts as instruments of convenience may one day find themselves governed by the very forces they sought to command. In his recent interventions, José Manuel Bolieiro has seemed to juggle—recklessly, almost theatrically—terms such as autonomy, sovereignty, and negotiating power, without due measure of their weight or consequence. To invoke autonomy as a kind of debt collector—extracting tribute from the Republic, hinting at tolls imposed upon the airspace above or the tarmac of Lajes—is to reduce geography to taxation and autonomy to a mere tariff, stripped of its deeper civic and historical meaning.

Political speech, however, is not an idle exercise in rhetorical flourish, nor a performance designed for easy consumption. Words, when spoken from the seat of governance, reverberate. They shape local realities—affecting investor confidence, labor stability, and the fragile trust of the electorate. They travel outward—informing how a region is perceived by the state and by international partners. And perhaps most enduringly, they settle into history—where they will be read again, reinterpreted, and judged. Responsible governance demands an awareness of these three dimensions: the immediate, the external, and the historical. To speak carelessly is to gamble across all three at once.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the matter of the Lajes Air Base. Operated by the United States Air Force under the framework of bilateral agreements, Lajes exists within a delicate architecture of international commitments. To reduce its significance to simplistic narratives is to ignore that every word uttered by a regional leader may be heard far beyond the islands—as a signal, a posture, even a provocation. In a volatile world, verbal lightness can carry diplomatic and strategic costs far exceeding the fleeting gains of media attention. And yet, to align blindly—almost servilely—with the dictates of Lisbon, itself too often bending toward whatever strongman occupies the global stage, is to erode the very credibility autonomy seeks to uphold.

The same failure of rhetorical responsibility emerges in the economic sphere. At the Lisbon Tourism Exchange, the President dismissed the concerns of the tourism sector as mere “drama and pessimism,” brushing aside, with a disconcerting lack of seriousness, the clarity of objective data: Ryanair’s departure, a ten percent decline in overnight stays, and a significant reduction in seat capacity already projected for the coming summer. When business owners struggle to meet payroll and social contributions, such language does not reassure—it alienates. It does not interpret reality—it denies it.

Another apocryphal line, this one attributed to Winston Churchill, reminds us that “courage is not only the ability to stand and speak, but also to sit and listen.” Whether Churchill said it or not, the wisdom holds. Governance is not merely the art of declaration; it is the discipline of attention. It requires the humility to hear, to weigh, to reflect. Every statement made by a leader enters, inevitably, the archive of history—where it may one day stand as evidence of prudence or as testimony to excess.

Enclosed within the narrowing echo of his own political sphere, balancing precariously at the edge of financial uncertainty, Bolieiro appears to have lost not only the discipline of restraint, but the older, quieter virtues of public speech: to speak less, to speak well, and above all, to understand that governance is not the management of passing interests, but the shaping of what is yet to come. As Victor Hugo once wrote in The Toilers of the Sea, “to know exactly how much of the future can be introduced into the present—that is the whole secret of great government.”

Pedro Arruda is a regular contributor to Azorean newspapers. We are thankful that he agreed to have his op-ed translated and available to our readers.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with a sense of the significant perspectives on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).

You can follow his writings in Portuguese online on: https://azoreansplendor.blogspot.com/