Dag Hammarskjold Quotes
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is ? is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.
Hammarskjöld, Dag. Markings. Translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, p. 173.
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. As of 2021, Hammarskjöld remains the youngest person to have held the Secretary-General post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed in 1953. His second term was cut short when he died in the crash of his DC-6 airplane in Northern Rhodesia while en route to cease-fire negotiations during the Congo Crisis. He is the only person in history to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
