Daily Inspiration Quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The line reads like a progress report from someone who’s watched modernity arrive from the cockpit: less dazzled by the machinery than by the human hunger it serves. Saint-Exupery stacks “mails,” “the human voice,” and “flickering pictures” into a brisk timeline of communications technology, then deliberately flattens their differences. Letters, telephone, cinema (or the early glow of broadcast) are treated as variations on one impulse, not separate revolutions. That’s the move: demystify innovation by reframing it as an old desire in new packaging.

The subtext carries his pilot’s ethic from Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight: distance is an enemy, not a romantic abstraction. To move mail is to move responsibility; to move a voice is to move intimacy; to move images is to move persuasion, fantasy, and collective attention. “Flickering pictures” is tellingly tactile and a little skeptical, acknowledging the fragility and intermittence of mediated life even as he credits its connective power.

“In this century as in others” adds a quiet rebuke to technological arrogance. The 20th century loved calling itself unprecedented; Saint-Exupery, writing in an era of mass media and mass war, insists that the headline isn’t novelty but reunion. Context matters: this is a writer formed by networks (air routes, airmail) and shattered by their misuse (propaganda, mobilization, occupation). The sentence works because it’s both generous and wary: it blesses the tools while reminding us the aim remains moral, not mechanical. If our highest accomplishments don’t bring people together, they’re just louder ways to be alone.