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“Silence is a statement, Diago. Inaction picks a side. And when those lead to personal benefit, they are complicity.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“Trilling believed, in other words, that philosophical coherence is not a notable feature of most people’s politics. Their political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mix of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. People hold certain views because it feels good or right to hold them (which is why they have an answer for pollsters even when they have never given an issue serious thought). Trilling thought that this does not make those opinions any less potent. On the contrary, it is unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that demand critical attention.”
― Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

“A person is courageous so long as he has no need for courage, but he collapses when the issue becomes real, and he is forced to understand courage as an act of “surrender,” a detachment from human involvement, and is content himself with being a spectator rather than a participant in life.”
― Ghassan Kanafani, ما تبقى لكم