Andre Malraux (1901-1976)

Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, member of the French Resistance, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine (1933) is set during the 1927 Shanghai uprising and won the Prix Goncourt; L'Espoir arose from his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. After the Second World War he abandoned fiction and wrote several works on art history, collected as La Psychologie de l'Art. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister (1945–46) and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency (1959–1969).

Quotes

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.

Duty, Leadership
The most important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten.
Between eigtheen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, nothing else.
What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

Quotations