Daily Inspiration Quote by Kjell Magne Bondevik

Bondevik’s line reads like a gentle nudge, but it carries the quiet authority of a statesman who knows that “understanding” is rarely blocked by lack of information and more often by lack of proximity. The key verb is “dare”: closeness isn’t framed as sentimental warmth, it’s framed as risk. To come closer is to invite complication - the mess of someone else’s history, needs, and contradictions. In politics, that’s precisely what abstract language is designed to avoid. “The people,” “the nation,” “immigrants,” “welfare recipients” - categories that let leaders govern from a safe distance.

The sentence also smuggles in a theory of social conflict. We misread others because we meet them at arm’s length, through institutions, headlines, and stereotypes. Bondevik offers a kind of moral technology: shorten the distance and the picture sharpens. It’s a call for contact not as a feel-good virtue, but as epistemology - a way of knowing. That’s why the promise is practical: “see and understand them better,” not “love them.”

Context matters: Bondevik is a Norwegian Christian-democratic leader, associated with consensus politics and humanitarian internationalism. In that tradition, the strongest argument isn’t dominance; it’s responsibility. The line fits a society that prizes social trust, but it also warns how fragile that trust is when communities retreat into curated bubbles. “Dare” becomes a rebuke to comfortable moralizing: if you want to judge someone, first risk meeting them.