Daily Inspiration Quote by Nadine Gordimer

Progress, for Gordimer, is less a victory parade than a sustained act of pressure against comfortable authority. The line pivots on a loaded contrast: "the convenience of the powers that be" versus "the unwritten charter". One is soft, managerial, and self-justifying; the other is moral, implicit, and stubbornly unpaid for. Gordimer makes "progress" sound procedural and exhausting on purpose: not a sweeping revolution, but "continuing efforts" - plural, ongoing, and human-scaled. It is a definition that refuses the modern PR version of progress as better gadgets, higher GDP, or smoother services. Instead, it is measured by how much ordinary people can force power to behave as if it has obligations.

The subtext is South Africa's apartheid state, where legality and legitimacy diverged violently. Gordimer lived inside a system that could make oppression administratively efficient - convenient - while denying the basic, unlegislated claims people make on one another: dignity, freedom of movement, equal standing before the law. By calling that moral baseline an "unwritten charter", she sidesteps the state's weapon of choice (the written law) and appeals to something older and harder to extinguish: a social contract that exists even when regimes pretend it doesn't.

The intent is quietly radical. "Narrow the gap" implies the gap will always be there; power always drifts toward self-serving ease. Progress, then, isn't a destination but a discipline: the relentless work of making institutions less comfortable in their injustices and more faithful to the rights they would rather treat as optional.