81
" It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're in the gutter, Colonel Babcock. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
84
" Tm merely trying to do my job. God, Scholscher, how can we talk of progress when we’re still destroying, all around us, life’s most beautiful and noble manifestations? Our artists, our architects, our scientists, our poets, sweat blood to make life more beautiful, and at the same time we force our way into the last forests left to us, with our finger on the trigger of an automatic weapon, and we poison the oceans and the very air we breathe with our atomic devices. Perhaps this madman Morel will succeed in rousing public opinion. By God, I feel I could join him in his maquis. We’ve got to resist this degradation. Are we no longer capable of respecting nature, or defending a living beauty that has no earning power, no utility, no object except to let itself be seen from time to time? Liberty, too, is a natural splendor on its way to becoming extinct. I’m speaking for myself to get it off my chest, because I haven't the courage to act like Morel. It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of a civilization. A utilitarian civilization will always go on to its logical conclusion-forced labor camps. We must leave a margin. And besides, let me tell you . . . There's nothing to be so proud of, is there? "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
86
" Abe Fields, in spite of his fever, felt pride in being a realistic American with the highest national income per head of population in the world, and the most comfortable standard of living since the beginning of evolution; the reptiles of the primeval sea could be proud of America, and the ancestor who had first crawled of his native mud, in a desperate effort
to become a man, might now sleep in peace— he had succeeded. His name should be venerated in every American school; he was the real pioneer, the father of free enterprise, of the spirit of initiative, of all those who dared, who risked, of all that had led to the stupendous material progress of the United States. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
87
" ...Fields told himself furiously that the humanists and humanitarians of all casts were undoubtedly the last and most arrogant aristocrats, that they never learned anything and always forgot everything They went into ecstasies over the splendor of nature, refused to be discouraged or to give up, and went on believing in liberty and humanity in spite of the evidence of forced labor camps and nationalistic hatred, of fear and cruelty and betrayal around them. They went on dreaming of freedom and of the rights of man, refusing to face the fact that their disappearance, like the disappearance of the elephants, was an irreversible process, the price paid by mankind for a new, modem and ruthlessly efficient world. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
89
" But because ivory was the first thing we were after when we came here at the turn of the century and because we’re the only ones to hunt with modem weapons, you’ve thought it smart to make elephant hunting the symbol of capitalist exploitation.
[...]
As long as the protection of the elephants was only a humanitarian idea, only a question of decency, of generosity, a margin of freedom to be preserved at all costs, his campaign had no chance of going very far with the governments concerned. But as soon as it threatened to turn into a political movement, it became explosive, and the authorities had to do something about it, take a real and active interest in the protection of the African fauna, forbid elephant hunting in all its ugly forms, ensure the threatened giants with all the protection and friendship they needed so much. He was convinced that some clever strategists among the governments concerned would do precisely this — and it was all he asked. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
97
" She was leaning over him, with a slight smile that was victorious over everything: victorious over her sickness, over the incandescent air, over her exhaustion, the dust, the stench, the merciless heat. Lying flat under the bush, his eyes blood- shot and his nose bleeding. Fields told himself that he would particularly have liked to inspire such love and devotion in a German he, the son of parents who had been gassed by the Germans at Auschwitz: it would have proved that to be a man was after all not hopeless. To fall in love with a German girl, he a Jew, that would show the Germans how he felt about it. But perhaps it was merely lust. "
― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven
