Life & Wisdom Quote by Ivo Andric

Andric’s line lands like a quiet correction to the usual moral panic. He isn’t offering comfort about “people being basically good”; he’s narrowing the target. Humans, as individuals, are not the problem. The problem is the switch inside them that can click from ordinary life into something cold, procedural, and unrecognizable - the inhuman that borrows a human face.

The rhetoric matters: the opening sounds almost conversational, even lightly admonishing (“One shouldn’t…”), then he undercuts it with a personal admission that refuses the easy stoicism. That pivot turns bravery into discernment. Fear, in Andric’s frame, isn’t weakness; it’s misdirected when aimed at “humans” in the abstract. What deserves fear is the moment when empathy is suspended and harm becomes rational, communal, even virtuous.

Coming from a Bosnian writer who lived through the convulsions of the early 20th century - empire, nationalism, war, occupation - the subtext is historical and intimate. Andric knew the particular Balkan tragedy of neighbors becoming categories, and categories becoming targets. “Inhuman” here isn’t monstrous outsiders; it’s the bureaucratic cruelty, the tribal certainty, the moral anesthesia that lets decent people participate in indecency.

The line also protects against a common escape hatch: blaming evil on aliens, villains, or “bad apples.” Andric insists the threat is endogenous. If you want to understand violence, look less at the caricature of the enemy and more at the ordinary conditions that make the inhuman feel permissible.