Daily Inspiration Quote by Slobodan Milosevic

Milosevic’s line is a masterclass in the false middle: a plea for “balance” designed to blur moral clarity when the record is anything but balanced. “We are not angels” is strategic self-diminishment, a way to sound sober and realistic, like a man allergic to propaganda. It lowers the bar just enough to make the second clause feel reasonable. Then comes the real move: “Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.” The “you” is doing heavy work, relocating agency away from his actions and onto an accusatory audience - foreign governments, international media, war-crimes investigators, anyone threatening to name what happened. If devils are “made,” then culpability is a fabrication, a narrative imposed from outside.

The intent is defensive, but not merely personal. It’s nationalist jiu-jitsu: fold individual responsibility into a collective “we,” turning indictment into an attack on a people. The phrasing smuggles in a grievance story - Serbs as targets of demonization - and dares listeners to prove their fairness by softening their judgment. It’s the rhetorical cousin of “both sides,” deployed not to illuminate complexity but to anesthetize it.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Milosevic spoke from within the wreckage of Yugoslavia’s collapse, amid wars where language wasn’t commentary; it was infrastructure. “Devils” isn’t just metaphor. It’s a warning label slapped on accountability itself, suggesting that prosecution is prejudice and that condemnation is hysteria. The line works because it flatters the audience’s desire to feel nuanced, even as it asks them to forget what nuance is for: distinguishing the merely flawed from the deliberately catastrophic.