"quest for unity" is a perfectly acceptable phrase to use in written English.
For example, you could write: "In today's fractured world, there is an urgent quest for unity and collective harmony."
But the quest for unity has exposed a fractured society that remains geographically separated and still largely controlled by Israel.
And the two are intertwined: they're both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe's leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.
Just as the need for tightened security will at times conflict with the nation's belief in broad civil liberties, the quest for unity is bound to clash with another American ideal: tolerance.
"The question now," he told me, "is whether our quest for unity with Rome can ever be filled institutionally — and is the ordinariate of Benedict XVI's proposal the answer?" He thought it might be: "The reason for an all-male episcopate is that it's the tradition of the Church.
Mr Obama also encouraged the Palestinians in their so-far-abortive quest for unity among themselves, in the implied hope that the Islamists of Hamas might eventually accept Israel's existence so that they may be sucked into negotiations; for without them, no plan will stick.
He was an ascetic whose views on the mystic quest for unity of the soul with God comprised a major theme in his philosophical mysticism.
First and foremost, this folklore was the quest for cultural unity of the Volk.
Or perhaps they're an oblique comment on Pärt's quest for oneness: "the complex and multifaceted only confuse me, and I must search for unity", he has said.
Avigdor Kehalani, leader of another coalition ally, The Third Way, has said that he would resign if the charges of sleaze were borne out.Shimon Peres, who is still, until June, Labour's leader, has put aside his quest for a national unity government (seen as a bid to save the peace process) and is demanding Mr Netanyahu's resignation and the holding of new elections.
As Europe expands in a quest for prosperity and elusive unity, many among its new members in the East fear that hundreds of thousands of people may be left behind in a new underclass, throwbacks to the lost era of command economies and state control.
Labour is looking north in its critical quest for a poster boy of party unity If you're going to lay it on thick, a centenary Remembrance Day is not a bad time to do so.
