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Kennemer dunes 360° today. Share [ radiate ]

Min/max temperature: 6°C/9°C; humidity: 100%; precipitation: 2 mm; sea level pressure: 1002 hPa; wind: WNW 43.0 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 304 m., Scattered Clouds 365 m., Mostly Cloudy 457 m

"'Cest le ton qui fait la musique.' A statement's tone and style decide about its meaning."

Quoted and translated from French by Martin M. Winkler in 'Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology', page 250, first published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, New York

" I love my own time too much and would not have chosen to live in any other even if that had been possible. Yet, if forced to an alternative I would choose to be the first European in Africa free to see, before we laid our blind, violent hands upon it, the vast land glowing from end to end in the blue of its Madonna days like some fabulous art gallery with newly restored and freshly painted Bushman canvases of smooth stone and honey-coloured rock. […] Already [ between the years 1800 and 1860 ] the Bushman's extensive hold on Africa had shrunk to the country along the Great River, the southern and central water-pints of what was to become the Orange Free State, and some of the steeper and deeper gorges of the Dragon ranges and their splintered spurs. He was still fighting back in tiny little pockets all over the veld but only in these areas did he retain some semblance of his former cohesion with his own kind and the other natural children of Africa. But about the year 1800 all that quickly changed. In that period pressure from the south reached greatest force; in the north, its starkest brutality. A long process of demoralisation of the spirit of the indigenous peoples of Africa was fast approaching its climax. Already, for centuries, human society in Africa had been society on the run. But in this period the whirlwind welter of migratory hordes having their violent way with weaker peoples, as well as the systematic raiding, year in and year out, deep into the heart of the continent by the pitiless slave trader from Zanzibar armed with powder and shot, produced a convulsion and disruption of human life and spirit on a scale not seen before. Terror, destruction, and disintegration, like the smell of the dead rotting on an apocalyptic battle field, stood high in the shining air. Almost every tribe of Africa picked up only what was negative in the situation. The weak lost the courage and wit that alone might have saved them and were ruled by blind terror. But they, too, whenever forced to flee into the country of someone even weaker than themselves, practised with all the ruthlessness of the convert the terror which had hitherto flayed them. The strong thought of little more than plundering and preying on the weak and making themselves even stronger. Then they feel out among themselves, setting up rival combinations for loot and destruction."

Laurens van der Post in 'The lost world of the Kalahari', page 30, 49, first published in 1958 by The Hogarth Press in Great Brittain

"The Tao of heaven is like bending a bow.
The high is lowered and the low is raised.
If the string is too long, it is shortened.
If there is not enough, it is made longer.

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough.
Ordinary people act differently.
They take from those who do not have enough and give to those who already have too much.
Who has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the wise.

Therefore the wise work without recognition.
They achieve what has to be done without dwelling on it.
They do not try to show their knowledge."

Lao Tsu in 'Tao Te Ching', page 80, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. Originaly published by Knopf, New York, 1972