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The Roots of Heaven

Book by Romain Gary · 4 quotes · Human Nature, Humanity, Animal Rights

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The Roots of Heaven Quotes

“It’s plain enough. But he’ll never be convinced. I’ve had long experience of this. They’ll explain to you that national independence is much more important than individual rights. In Finland, when I was defending the forests, the Russian officials kept explaining to me patiently that pulp for making paper is after all more important than the trees. They understood only when there were almost no forests left. And the whalers kept explaining to me that whale oil was needed on the market and was much more important than whales. It goes on and on.”

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“You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.”

NationalismIndustrializationLoss Of IdentityWesternizationDecline Of CivilizationDecline Of The West
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“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.”

Life LessonsHumanityHuman RightsToleranceAnimal RightsBeauty Of LifeIndustrializationWesternizationLabor Camp
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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