Salvador de Madariaga
Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo was a Galician diplomat, writer, historian, and pacifist.
De Madariaga graduated with a degree in engineering in Paris, France. He then went to work as an engineer for the Northern Spanish Railway Company but abandoned this work to return to London and become a journalist, writing in English, for The Times. At this time, he began publishing his first essays. He became a press member of the Secretariat of the League of Nations in 1921, and chief of the Disarmament Section in 1922. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Spanish at Oxford University for three years, during which time he wrote a book on nation psychology called Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards.
In 1931, he was appointed ambassador to the United States of America and a permanent delegate to the League of Nations, a post he kept for 5 years. Chairing the Council of the League of Nations in January 1932, he condemned Japanese aggression in Manchuria in such vehement terms that he was nicknamed "Don Quijote de la Manchuria".[2] Between 1932 and 1934, he was Ambassador to France. In 1933, he was elected to the National Congress, serving as both Minister for Education and Minister for Justice. In July 1936, as a classic liberal he went into exile in England to escape the Spanish civil war. From there he became a vocal opponent of, and organised resistance to, the Nacionales and the Spanish State of Francisco Franco. In 1947, he was one of the principal authors of the Oxford Manifesto on liberalism. He participated in the Hague Congress in 1948 as president of the Cultural Commission and he was one of the co-founders, in 1949, of the College of Europe.
In his writing career he wrote books and essays about Don Quixote, Christopher Columbus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the history of Latin America. He militated in favour of a united and integrated Europe. He wrote in French and German as well as Spanish and Galician (his mother tongue) and English. In 1973 he won the Karlspreis for contributions to the European idea and European peace. In 1976, he returned to Spain after the death of Francisco Franco. The Madariaga European Foundation has been named after him, promoting his vision of a united Europe making for a more peaceful world. The 1979–1980 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.
“If man is but a biological organism and biology itself may be reduced to a set of physical and chemical laws, it should be possible to build up a biological science, a kind of biological mechanics, whose laws would rule the working and repair of the several pieces of the human machine. In such a case, there would be a 'medicine' or 'medical science'; and the doctor's task would consist in acquiring and maintaining an adequate knowledge of the laws of such a science and applying them so to speak in a uniform and automatic way, with hardly any meddling from his own personal criterion. If, on the contrary, man is above all an eminently living being, every specimen of which is ever new and original, a being strongly influenced by ultra-physical faculties -- spirit, intellect, emotions -- if, in one word, man is a whole that can only be ruled from its own centre, medicine, then, will be but an art or a craft to be applied in each case to a concrete individual. And then, rather than 'medicine', there will be medicine-men. Truth lies between these two poles, but gravitates definitely towards the second.”
“The best pastimes for a true enjoyer of leisure who has to stay at home . . .: reading by the fireside. . . . Listening to music.”
“The ideal holiday for the truly active man is one doing nothing in beautiful surroundings . . . and the ideal exercise for this best form of leisure is the old, natural, spontaneous movement of the body -- the walk.”
“Action is the music of our life. Like music, it starts from a pause of leisure, a silence of activity which our initiative attacks; then it develops according to its inner logic, passes its climax, seeks its cadence, ends, and restores silence, leisure again. Action and leisure are thus interdependent; echoing and recalling each other, so that action enlivens leisure with its memories and anticipations, and leisure expands and raises action beyond its mere immediate self and gives it a permanent meaning.”
“The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.”
“Sermons seldom convert sinners; they sometimes goad them into more sin.”
“My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.”
“The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the divinities, the values, the supreme aims served respectively by these three kinds of men with an undivided loyalty: truth for the scientist; beauty for the artist; goodness for the saint. The discussion on what these words mean will never end. We must be content with taking note of their clarity as symbols, and of the singular force which animates them and makes of them powerful poles of attraction.”
“On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.”
“The criminal excesses of unlimited capitalistic liberty had soon been checked thanks to the unlimited liberty of the press.”
“To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.”
“Literature is an art, and the essence of all art is mood.”
“Circumstances are the seeds of literature.”
“Von der Pressefreiheit hängt praktisch jede andere Freiheit ab.”