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Quote by Maurice Druon

“Every man believes to some extent that the world began when he was born and, at the moment of leaving it, suffers at having to let the Universe remain unfinished.”

Quote by Maurice Druon

Book:The Iron King
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The Iron King

This book is a tale of a young protagonist who becomes the Iron King, a ruler of immense power and influence. The story delves into themes of ambition, betrayal, and the consequences of wielding great power. The narrative unfolds in a richly detailed fantasy world, filled with magical creatures and political intrigue. more

Author

Maurice Druon
Maurice Druon

Maurice Druon was a renowned French novelist, known for his historical novels that often explored social and political issues set against the backdrop of French history. Born on April 23, 1918, in Paris, France, he passed away on April 14, 2009. more

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“Compare Socrates then, one of the smartest men who ever lived, to just about every member of the political class today. Political orientation scarcely matters. Nearly everyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who aspires to any sort of political office from small town mayor to President of the United States, begins his political journey with the belief that he knows best how other people should live. And it is the goal of every politician to inflict his knowledge on the rest of us. And why wouldn’t it be? If they really know how people should live, why wouldn’t they try to impose their ideas on the rest of us?”

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“When politicians talk about raising the minimum wage, they talk about the single working mother who is holding down two jobs to support her family. The reality is that the average minimum wage worker is part time and lives in a household with a family income of more than $53,000, which is about the United States median household income.”

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“In both the public and the private sectors, one can find people who are altruistic, selfish, smart, stupid, capable, incompetent, and just about every other description. They are all drawn from the same mass of people in roughly the same proportions. What is true of all of these people is that they pursue what they believe will make them happy, and they respond to the incentives that surround them. When those incentives are tied directly to their job performance, people’s quest for happiness encourages them to behave in ways that satisfy the people for whom they perform their jobs. But when people’s incentives are tied to something else, like voters avoiding the cost of becoming informed, or politicians attracting more voters, or bureaucrats making their jobs less difficult, the outcomes that emerge can be very different from the outcomes people had in mind when they empowered government to pursue those outcomes in the first place. Consider the typical experiences with the Post Office versus FedEx, Amtrak versus Southwest, applying for a driver’s license versus applying for a credit card, or applying for federal financial aid versus applying for a bank loan.”

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“Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.”

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“From the fact that the rule of law is a limitation upon all legislation, it follows that it cannot itself be a law in the same sense as the laws passed by the legislator. Constitutional provisions may make infringements of the rule of law more difficult. They may help to prevent inadvertent infringements by routine legislation. But the ultimate legislator can never limit his own powers by law, because he can always abrogate any law he has made. The rule of law is therefore not a rule of the law, but a rule concerning what the law ought to be, a meta-legal doctrine or a political ideal. It will be effective only in so far as the legislator feels bound by it. In a democracy this means that it will not prevail unless it forms part of the moral tradition of the community, a common ideal shared and unquestioningly accepted by the majority.”

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