Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

A bureaucrat’s nightmare masquerading as a joke: the more “international” a forum becomes, the more it drowns in its own good intentions. Bajer’s line is built like a tidy committee memo that suddenly swerves into satire. He starts with the polite, procedural language of consensus - “it has since been agreed” - a phrase that signals process over passion, the sound of diplomacy congratulating itself. Then he stacks languages the way institutions stack paperwork: English to French, French to English, then “when necessary” German and Italian. The list does the work of a punchline, because each addition suggests not inclusion but inflation: every concession multiplies the machinery required to sustain the conversation.

The last sentence is where the needle goes in. Esperanto, the late-19th-century dream of a neutral universal language, appears here not as utopian solution but as the next predictable “demand” in an endless chain of demands. Bajer doesn’t mock multilingualism so much as the fantasy that political harmony can be engineered through the right linguistic protocol. The subtext is that translation is never just technical; it’s power. Deciding which languages get translated, and when, encodes whose voices are presumed central and whose are “necessary” only occasionally.

Given Bajer’s era - the age of peace congresses, rising nationalism, and early international institutions - the wit lands as a warning: ideals of cooperation are real, but they can be smothered by administrative rituals that mistake procedural fairness for actual understanding.