It has been said that the United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell. I think that sums up as well as anything I have heard both the essential role of the United Nations and the attitude of mind we should bring to it's support.
For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.
Dag Hammarskjöld
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Category: Note
Faith in national self-determination is both an asset and a liability: Asset as a resolution to shape a national destiny and assume the responsibility for it, as a brake on immature experiments in international integration; but a liability when it makes us blind to the necessity of international organization, necessary to the life of the nation.
Category: Note
When nationalism stands for self-sufficient isolationism, and internationalism belittles the importance of national life, then words become contradictory and the corresponding attitudes, irreconcilable. With one part of his being the individual belongs to his native country, and with another part he is a citizen of a world that does not admit of national isolation any more. The question is not either the nation or the world but how to serve the world by serving one’s people or how to serve one’s nation by serving the world.
Category: Quotation
The United Nations is not and should not be an organizational strait-jacket on the world or on the independent states which are its members.