People From Brussels

"My country and I recognize with joy and emotion that the Congo has acceded on June 30, 1960, in full accord and friendships with Belgium, to independence and international sovereignty."

"It is indisputable that the blacks have benefited from certain benefits of civilization."

"When Leopold II began his great work, which today finds its culmination, he presented himself to you not as a conqueror but as a bringer of civilization. The Congo was endowed with railways, roads, shipping and air connections. Our medical facilities have freed you from many devastating diseases. Many well-equipped hospitals have been established. Agriculture has been improved and modernized. Great cities have been built. Living conditions and hygiene have improved. Mission and state schools have brought education on a large scale."

"The negro workers are still unaware of the force that can give them union organization; happy industrialists."

"It is the great misery in the Congo, the negro does all the work, he is not paid, he is beaten. When the whites return to Europe, they are replaced by Others who mistreat us. King Albert and Queen Elisabeth came, when they are there, we are left alone, but when they are gone, it will be the same. The King does not know all this, everything is hidden from him. It is the great misery here in the Congo. The captain is very bad for us, but when Queen Elisabeth is on the boat, he does not dare to hit us."

"The British people realise that they are fighting for the hegemony of the Empire. If necessary we shall continue the war single-handed."

"The principal dangers for you are the inexperiences of your people in government affairs, tribal fights which have done so much harm and must at all cost be stopped, and the attraction which certain of your regions can have for foreign powers which are ready to profit from the least sign of weakness."

"The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II undertaken by him with firm courage, and continued by Belgium with perseverance. Independence marks a decisive hour in the destinies not only of the Congo herself but- I don't hesitate to say-of the whole of Africa."

"I am struck that quite a few black workers do not greet us and watch us pass by with folded arms. There are dances in the evening, not very lively. We feel that the strain of hard woodworking weighs on the morale of the natives."

"The reception was enthusiastic and brilliant. The city appears largely mapped out, too bad there are so many ugly buildings that make it look like a city in the American Far West."

"Visit of the incomparable and impressive installations of Union Minière. We go up the hill. The sight is prestigious: the station, one of the most important in Africa, the buildings, the Europeans with the houses surrounded by gardens, the vast chessboard of the native city. The Negro workers that we see do not look unhappy, they are in good health."

"The companies are complaining, but they have not done what is necessary to retain their workforce. They have relied too much on the obligation that the administration placed on the population."

"Brilliant reception at the station. Children are tidied up as soon as they enter the mission grounds. There is perfect order. The mission makes a big impression."

"What a beautiful breed these Wagenias and how friendly."

"Having a proper sense of her duty, and the means to carry it out, Belgium has mapped out her own course, and intends to keep to it. It entails a policy of humanity and progress. To a nation whos only aim is justice, the mission of colonization can only be a mission of high civilization: a small nation proves it greatness by carrying it out faithfully. Belgium has kept her word."

"A real city, well laid out, with pretty houses, 1500 whites, it makes an excellent impression, better than Elisabethville. Here they are serious people, harnessed to a grandiose enterprise."

"The chief comes to greet us, he is a handsome Baluba negro, dressed as a European with a white helmet; shame."

"The surrender of the Belgian Army compelled the British at the shortest notice to cover a flank to the sea more than 30 miles in length. Otherwise all would have been cut off, and all would have shared the fate to which King Leopold had condemned the finest Army his country had ever formed."

"The Parliament's acceptance of such measures would enable me to temporarily entrust the exercise of my pregoratives to the Crown Prince and, in agreement with the Government, to end this task when I consider that the interests of the country are also served."

"In view of the rapid changes taking place in the world today, it seemed to me desirable to preserve in picture and sound some reflection of the surviving vestiges of the ancient life of the Congo, there is a communion between the man of the forest and his natural surroundings which inspires us in a sense of respect a recognition of spiritual heritage, I thank all those who have helped me to achieve this task which combines beauty and scientific truth."

"Brutally attacked by Germany which had entered into the most solemn engagements with her, Belgium will defend herself with all of her strength against the invader. In these tragic hours which my country is undergoing, I am addressing myself to Your Excellency, who so often has demonstrated towards Belgium an affectionate interest, in the certainty that you will support with all of your moral authority the efforts which we are now firmly decided to make in order to preserve our independence."

"Production is ensured by the native working no longer as an employee, but as a free peasant, owner of his land."

"On July 31, 1950, I accepted to hand over the royal powers to my son. It was my will to renounce the throne for good as soon as it turned out that all Belgians would have united themselves around Prince Baudouin. I now establish that this unanimity has been achieved. The last words I wish to say as king of the Belgians will strongly indicate that the future of the fatherland depends on your national solidarity, I swear to agree to you, God protect Belgium and our Congo."

"That was the prospect a week ago. But another blow which might well have proved final was yet to fall upon us. The King of the Belgians had called upon us to come to his aid. Had not this Ruler and his Government severed themselves from the Allies, who rescued their country from extinction in the late war, and had they not sought refuge in what was proved to be a fatal neutrality, the French and British Armies might well at the outset have saved not only Belgium but perhaps even Poland. Yet at the last moment, when Belgium was already invaded, King Leopold called upon us to come to his aid, and even at the last moment we came. He and his brave, efficient Army, nearly half a million strong, guarded our left flank and thus kept open our only line of retreat to the sea. Suddenly, without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his Ministers and upon his own personal act, he sent a plenipotentiary to the German Command, surrendered his Army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat."

"In the brave old days, I used to know Ralph Miliband, father of David and Edward and one of Britain’s leading Marxist intellectuals. There was a European for you: part Polish, part Belgian, and part Jewish, arriving in England on forged papers as an illegal immigrant refugee from Hitler. His best-known book was Parliamentary Socialism, in which he analyzed Labor’s attempt to transform society through the ballot box. His conclusion was that a party too wedded to pragmatism and compromise would in the end sacrifice its principles, but in doing so it would also cease to work as an electoral machine. Perhaps I’ll take this book down from the dusty old shelf on which I have preserved it."

"The Left is rather prone to a perspective according to which the class struggle is something waged by the workers and the subordinate classes against the dominant ones.It is of course that. But class struggle also means, and often means first of all, the struggle waged by the dominant class, and the state acting on its behalf, against the workers and the subordinate classes. By definition, struggle is not a one way process; but it is just as well to emphasize that it is actively waged by the dominant class or classes, and in many ways much more effectively waged by them than the struggle waged by the subordinate classes."

"I could have done nothing more worthwhile than to give a new description of the whole human body, of which nobody understood the anatomy, while Galen, despite his extensive writings, has offered very little on the subject."

"...but also perhaps you sometimes delight in consideration of the most perfectly constructed of all creatures, and take delight in considering the temporary lodging and instrument of the immortal soul, a dwelling that in many respects corresponds to the universe and for that reason was called the little universe [microcosmos] by the ancients."

"I have done my best to this single end, to aid as many as possible in a very recondite as well as laborious matter, and truly and completely to describe the structure of the human body which is formed not of ten or twelve parts-- as it may seem to the spectator-- but of some thousands of different parts."

"I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations."

"I strive that in public dissection the students do as much as possible."

"By not first explaining the bones, anatomists delay the inexperienced student and, because of the difficulty of the subject, deter him from a very worthy examination of the works of God."

"Passing over the other arts in silence, I shall speak briefly of that which concerns the health of mankind; indeed, of all the arts the genius of man has discovered it is by far the most beneficial and of prime necessity, although difficult and laborious."

"In our age nothing has been so degraded and then wholly restored as anatomy."

"At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations. With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory."

"What we hear about eternal inflation or the string landscape, seems somehow unavoidably to lead to some kind of multiverse. However, it seems to me there is a fundamental problem there. Once of course you have the multiverse, then you can start playing around and try to find probability or getting to the anthropic principle, or whatever. But the point is that the picture is essentially a classical one, and it is difficult to see that if you have many universes, coming essentially with an inflationary state, that there would not be plenty of horizons in this. Now the quantum mechanics of horizons is, I think, perfectly not understood. The simplest example is the black hole, where after all nobody knows really if the problem lies in the singularity or if it lies really already in the horizon."

"Three distinct geometries on S7 arise as solutions of the classical equations of motion in eleven dimensions. In addition to the conventional riemannian geometry, one can also obtain the two exceptional Cartan-Schouten compact flat geometries with torsion."

"The BEH mechanism operates within the context of gauge theories. Despite the fact that grand unification schemes reach scales comparable to the Planck scale, there was, a priori, no indication that Yang-Mills fields offer any insight into quantum gravity. The only approach to quantum gravity that had some success, in particular in the context of a quantum interpretation of the black hole entropies, are the superstring theory approaches and the possible merging of the five perturbative approaches (Type IIA, IIB, Type I and the two heterotic strings) into an elusive M-theory whose classical limit would be 11-dimensional supergravity."

"Usually mathematicians are either theory builders, who develop tools, or problem-solvers, who use those tools to find solutions... Deligne is unusual in being both. He’s got a very special mind."

"From Grothendieck] and his example, I have also learned not to take glory in the difficulty of a proof: difficulty means we have not understood. The ideal is to be able to paint a landscape in which the proof is obvious."

"The nice thing about mathematics is doing mathematics."

"In Récoltes et Semailles, Grothendieck counts his twelve disciples. The central character is Pierre Deligne, who combines in this tale the features of John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, and Judas the betrayer. The weight of symbols!"

"Deligne’s method was totally perpendicular to Grothendieck’s: he knew every trick of his master’s trade by heart, every concept, every variant. His proof, given in 1974, is a frontal attack and a marvel of precision, in which the steps follow each other in an absolutely natural order, without surprises. Those who heard his lectures had the impression, day after day, that nothing new was happening–whereas every lecture by Grothendieck introduced a whole new world of concepts, each more general than the one before–but on the last day, everything was in place and victory was assured. Deligne knocked down the obstacles one after the other, but each one of them was familiar in style. I think that this opposition of methods, or rather of temperament, is the true reason behind the personal conflict which developed between the two of them. I also think that the fact that “John, the disciple that Jesus loved” wrote the last Gospel by himself partly explains Grothendieck’s furious exile that Grothendieck has imposed upon himself."

"Laurette Onkelinx: Why did the king have to receive the Vlaams Belang? This is a racist and violent party and I think that the message given by the king is damaging."

"Princess Marie-Esméralda of Belgium: I am accused of attacking my family and especially the person of the king. That was clearly never my intention, I know how complex and delicate the situation in Belgium is. I know that the king cannot act politically without the permission of the government. I also know how passionate my cousin is about history, but also sensitive to the aspirations and feelings of his fellow citizens. We live in a crucial moment. The opportunity for inter-community dialogue must be seized."

"Tom Van Grieken: It is completely normal to invite a party that has won the elections. I was pleased with the invitation … I am not going to say it is unnatural. This is natural. What happened over the past 40 years was not democratic."

"The homework is obviously in Dutch. I adapt myself accordingly. The kids just think in Dutch."

"Your work creates a foundation for these children's future, ... But most of all, I've been struck by the children's own desire to solve their problems."

"I swear to abide by the constitution and laws of the Belgian people, to maintain national independence and the integrity of the land."

"I begin my reign with the desire to put myself at the service of all Belgians. I will work for it in perfect agreement with the government and in accordance with the constitution."