Tom

“There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged categories was that everyone who demanded to have an 'exception' made in his case implicitly recognized the rule, but this point, apparently, was never grasped by these 'good men,' Jewish and Gentile, who busied themselves about all those 'special cases' for which preferential treatment could be asked... But if the Jewish and Gentile pleaders of 'special cases' were unaware of their involuntary complicity, this implicit recognition of the rule, which spelled death for all non-special cases, must have been very obvious to those who were engaged in the business of murder. They must have felt, at least, that by being asked to make exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of the lawfulness of what they were doing.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“[A]t the moments when the public's interest is aroused, the public is never well informed enough to have the right to an opinion.”
― T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture