Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 2 (p. 19)
“It is more difficult to avoid being ruled than to rule others.”
Il est plus difficile de s’empêcher d’être gouverné que de gouverner les autres.
Maxim 151.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Often paraphrased as: Always be a little kinder than necessary.
Source: The Little White Bird (1902), Ch. 4
"The Cultural Apparatus"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)
“There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.”
Source: Grave Peril
“Of all things difficult to rule, none were more so than my will and affections.”
Source: Passion and Purity
Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism <!-- p. 183 -->
Context: As Bovet has demonstrated in the field of morals, rules do not appear in the mind of the child as innate facts, but as facts that are transmitted to him by his seniors, and to which from his tenderest years he has to conform by means of a sui generis form of adaptation. This, of course, does not prevent some rules from containing more than others an element of rationality, thus corresponding to the deepest fundamental constants of human nature. But whether they be rational or simply a matter of usage and consensus of opinion, rules imposed on the childish mind by adult constraint do begin by presenting a more or less uniform character of exteriority and sheer authority. So that instead of passing smoothly from an early individualism (the "social" element of the first months is only biologically social, so to speak, inside the individual, and therefore individualistic) to a state of progressive cooperation, the child is from his first year onwards in the grip of coercive education which goes straight on and ends by producing what Claprède has so happily called a veritable "short circuit."
