Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism:
… an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated … made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously.
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Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil:
… when modern people set in motion vast social institutions but do not take critical control of them, the institutions assume their own momentum; the people who run the institutions become like ants mechanically doing their duty, and no one dares to question the routine to which the institutions conform.
The result is that there is no way of breaking through the uncritical fictions that control society and that are embodied in vast and powerful, faceless organizations. Responsibility is nowhere; grinding power everywhere.
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Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy:
‘… they have no respect for great misfortune, great ugliness, for great failure.’ They have no respect for great misfortune, great ugliness, for great failure! This is the final word of the philosophy of tragedy.
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Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’:
Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
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Paul Valéry, ‘Politics of the Mind’:
Perhaps you are expecting me to draw some conclusion. We like a play to end happily, or at least to end. You shall have prompt satisfaction on the latter point. For the other, I repeat that my subject is precisely the impossibility of concluding. The need for a conclusion is so strong in us that we irresistibly and absurdly import conclusions into history and even into politics. We cut out patterns of events to make well-rounded tragedies; we want a war, when it ends, to have a clear-cut ending. There is no need for me to tell you that unfortunately this desire is illusory.
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Anton Chekhov, In the Ravine:
A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars. Lipa had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a single light. It was probably about nine miles’ walk home, but she had not the strength, she had not the power to think how to go: the moon gleamed now in front, now on the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling in a voice grown husky, with a chuckle as though gibing at her: “Oy, look out, you'll lose your way!” Lipa walked rapidly; she lost the kerchief from her head. She looked at the sky and wondered where her baby’s soul was now: was it following her, or floating aloft yonder among the stars and thinking nothing now of his mother? Oh, how lonely it was in the open country at night, in the midst of that singing when one cannot sing oneself; in the midst of the incessant cries of joy when one cannot oneself be joyful, when the moon, which cares not whether it is spring or winter, whether men are alive or dead, looks down as lonely, too.