Marked
Hannah Arendt, On Violence:
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force:
The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.
Svetlana Alexievich, Boys in Zinc:
Day after day I see man slipping lower. And only rarely rising higher.
Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov remarks: ‘An animal can never be as cruel as a human being, as artfully, artistically cruel.’
Yes, I suspect that we don’t want to hear about this, we don’t want to know about this.
Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance:
Description, documentation, testimony: each falls short in the wake of these insane slaughters. Mercy, when it was needed, was absent; reason, when it was called for, disappeared: these are the facts to confront, and these are the facts that resist confrontation. To look at these pictures is necessary, but its only guarantee is failure. The closer one gets, the further a comprehensible world secedes; the more one knows, the less one understands.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas:
A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove.
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Prints from Francisco Goya, The Disasters of War.