Hugo

“As we have seen, the revolutionary governments, ​​beset by enemies domestic and foreign, real and imagined, sought to use passport controls and other documentary means – “fragments from the wreckage of the old order” – to regulate the movements of émigrés, counterrevolutionary brigands, refractory priests, itinerant mendicants, conscripted soldiers, and the foreign-born, among others. While these devices may have been effective in many instances, the chaos and disorder ravaging the country, the efforts of dissident groups, and the lack of a well-articulated bureaucratic apparatus simply overwhelmed the government’s capacity to assert a successful monopoly on the legitimate means of movement at this time.”
― John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State

“The United Nations relies on factuality—and steady ideals—to progress. “No institution,” he once observed, “can become effective unless it is forced to wrestle with the problems, the conflicts, and the tribulations of real life.”5 For this reason, he didn’t mind the clash of ideas and agendas at UN meetings large and small. On the contrary, he welcomed substantive debate and the often awkward search for solutions. “I feel that what very many people call negative sides—the talking, the conflicts, the flux of events, the uncertainties about outcomes and so on and so forth—are not negative sides but positive sides.”6 Obstacles and delays were to be expected: “Setbacks in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong…. At the beginning of great changes in human society there must always be a stage of…frailty or seeming inconsistency.”7”
― Roger Lipsey, Politics and Conscience: Dag Hammarskjold on the Art of Ethical Leadership

“L’air marin nous incitait à la bonne humeur. Le plaisir que nous goûtions et qui fêtait tous nos sens, enivrait sainement, aussi bien le riche que le pauvre. Notre communion, avec la nature profonde, insondable et illimitée, désintoxiquait notre âme. Le découragement et la tristesse s’en allaient, soudainement remplacés par des sentiments de plénitude et d’épanouissement.”
― Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (Roman)

“Pour vaincre ma rancœur, je pense à la destinée humaine. Chaque vie recèle une parcelle d’héroïsme, un héroïsme obscur fait d’abdications, de renoncements et d’acquiescements, sous le fouet impitoyable de la fatalité. Je pense aux aveugles du monde entier qui se meuvent dans le noir. Je pense aux paralytiques du monde entier qui se traînent. Je pense aux lépreux du monde entier que leur mal ampute.”
― Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (Roman)