Daily Inspiration Quote by Alva Myrdal

Global development, in Alva Myrdal's telling, isn’t a tidy technocratic project with neutral metrics; it’s moral combat. That opening move - “a struggle between the forces of good and evil” - intentionally yanks the conversation away from spreadsheets and into ethics, where responsibility can’t be outsourced to “complexity.” Coming from a diplomat who worked in the long shadow of World War II and the early Cold War, the line reads as a refusal to let power politics masquerade as inevitability. If development decisions shape who eats, who governs, who lives, then pretending they’re value-free is itself a value choice.

The second sentence is the real pivot: she invokes Jesus and Satan only to deny them. It’s a rhetorical feint that disarms two common traps at once. First, it rejects simplistic melodrama: she’s not calling for crusades or moral panic. Second, it rejects Western parochialism - the lazy habit of treating Christian imagery as a universal moral map. Myrdal keeps the moral stakes but widens the frame, insisting that “good and evil” aren’t proprietary terms owned by any single civilization. That’s a pointed diplomatic gesture: an invitation to global solidarity without demanding cultural submission.

Subtextually, she’s also warning against the era’s ideological binaries. By refusing to “restrict” the struggle to “our own sphere of culture,” she undercuts the West’s temptation to label itself “good” by default, while casting rivals as metaphysical villains. The quote works because it threads a needle: moral clarity without cultural arrogance, urgency without holy-war theater.