Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Montseny’s line refuses the comforting fairy tale that history is a moral escalator. Men are “neither better nor worse” is not resignation so much as a warning: the raw materials of human behavior do not evolve on schedule, and political movements that bet on automatic enlightenment end up blindsided by the old instincts in new uniforms.

The sentence works by cross-wiring categories that political rhetoric usually keeps sealed. “From the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty” grants even the compromised a capacity for clarity and decency, especially when the stakes are stripped bare by crisis. Then she flips the blade: “from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite,” making virtue itself unstable. The subtext is brutal: self-identified “good people” are not the firewall against violence; they can be its most efficient delivery system once fear, ideology, or grievance gives them permission.

The climax - “a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood” - isn’t poetic excess; it’s diagnostic language. Extermination is bureaucratic, programmatic, modern. Blood is intimate, primal. Pairing them captures how mass violence requires both: the cold moral alibi of “necessity” and the hot emotional reward of domination.

Context matters. Montseny, an anarchist who became Spain’s Minister of Health during the Civil War, watched revolutionary idealism collide with factional purges and state terror. Her intent reads like prophylaxis against romantic politics: don’t build strategies on purity myths. Build them assuming the worst capacities can surface anywhere, especially inside the camps that call themselves righteous.