Daily Inspiration Quote by Andre Gide

Monsters are mostly a convenience: a way to launder messy human anxieties into a single, theatrical shape. Gide’s line doesn’t deny evil; it questions the inflation of it. The sting is in “warrant,” a legalistic word that turns fear into a claim that must be justified with evidence. Fear, Gide implies, is often an overcharged currency we spend on the wrong targets.

As a novelist who made a career of prying open bourgeois moral certainty, Gide is wary of the social uses of “monsters.” Label someone monstrous and you stop having to understand them; you also stop having to examine yourself. The subtext is less “don’t be afraid” than “be precise.” Panic is lazy. It prefers archetypes to particulars, and it flatters the frightened by making them feel innocent: if the threat is inhuman, then our response can be inhuman, too.

The phrasing also smuggles in a moral asymmetry. “Very few monsters” suggests that true predators exist, but they’re rarer than our cultural scripts insist. The rest are projections: scapegoats built from rumor, prejudice, and the pleasure of a clear enemy. Gide wrote in a Europe that repeatedly dressed political opponents, sexual nonconformists, and outsiders in monstrous costumes to justify surveillance, punishment, and purges. His skepticism reads like a warning label for every moral panic.

What makes the sentence work is its calm, almost understated cadence. No outrage, no sermon - just a cool recalibration of proportion. It asks the reader to trade adrenaline for discernment, and in doing so, indicts fear itself as a kind of fiction we’re too eager to co-author.