"I love the lambs, not the sheep"
About this Quote
A diplomat’s line that pretends to be pastoral is really a scalpel. “I love the lambs, not the sheep” works because it flatters innocence while insulting conformity, and it does both with the clean cruelty of a proverb. Lambs are young, tender, unformed; sheep are the adult version, socialized into the flock. Peyrefitte isn’t praising youth in the abstract so much as announcing a preference for people before they’ve learned to obey.
The subtext is elitist and predatory at once. “Love” here can mean aesthetic affection, political sympathy, or erotic desire, and Peyrefitte’s reputation makes the ambiguity feel pointed rather than poetic. He wraps appetite in allegory: the speaker is not saying “I dislike most people,” he’s saying “I like them best when they’re pliable.” That’s a darker confession than mere contrarianism. It implies that adulthood is a kind of moral compromise, a surrender to herd thinking, and that the speaker’s tenderness depends on someone else’s naivete.
The context of a diplomat matters. Diplomacy is the art of managing appearances, of treating publics as crowds to be guided, soothed, and, when necessary, steered. In that light, the line reads like an insider’s sneer at mass politics: the flock is useful, but never lovable; the young are still individual enough to be interesting. Peyrefitte compresses a whole worldview into seven words: contempt for the herd, craving for the unguarded, and the cynical comfort of believing purity exists only before society gets its hands on you.
The subtext is elitist and predatory at once. “Love” here can mean aesthetic affection, political sympathy, or erotic desire, and Peyrefitte’s reputation makes the ambiguity feel pointed rather than poetic. He wraps appetite in allegory: the speaker is not saying “I dislike most people,” he’s saying “I like them best when they’re pliable.” That’s a darker confession than mere contrarianism. It implies that adulthood is a kind of moral compromise, a surrender to herd thinking, and that the speaker’s tenderness depends on someone else’s naivete.
The context of a diplomat matters. Diplomacy is the art of managing appearances, of treating publics as crowds to be guided, soothed, and, when necessary, steered. In that light, the line reads like an insider’s sneer at mass politics: the flock is useful, but never lovable; the young are still individual enough to be interesting. Peyrefitte compresses a whole worldview into seven words: contempt for the herd, craving for the unguarded, and the cynical comfort of believing purity exists only before society gets its hands on you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Roger
Add to List
