Life & Mortality Quote by Ivo Andric

The line lands like a curtain yanked back on the machinery of power: not evil masterminds, just shortage of mind at the wheel. Andric’s sting is in the word “little.” He’s not claiming the world is run by pure malice or even pure incompetence; he’s suggesting it’s run by thin reasoning, improvised judgment, habit, and ego dressed up as policy. The punch isn’t that leaders are monstrous, but that they’re ordinary - and the stakes are not.

As a writer forged in the Balkans’ 20th-century upheavals, Andric understood governance as a theater where the props (flags, speeches, procedures) can look sturdier than the thinking behind them. His career, spanning empires collapsing, ideologies hardening, and wars becoming administrative, gave him a front-row seat to how history gets made: through misread signals, bureaucratic inertia, and the terrifying momentum of group decisions. “Ruling the world” here isn’t a single ruler; it’s the system - cabinets, committees, armies, newspapers - all susceptible to the same cognitive shortcuts.

The subtext is a grim inversion of the comforting myth that someone, somewhere, is in control. Andric implies we outsource our sanity to authority because the alternative is vertigo. If we fully grasped how contingent, impulsive, and under-thought major decisions can be, fear would be rational. The line works because it refuses catharsis: it doesn’t offer reform, only clarity - and the cost of that clarity is panic.