David Goldman

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“To anticipate, and put it in a nutshell: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think

“Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition