7jane

“The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence. Forgiveness breaks the chain. It introduces into the logic of interpersonal encounter the unpredictability of grace. It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do. It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity. Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation. Forgiveness means that we are not destined endlessly to replay the grievances of yesterday. It is the ability to live with the past without being held captive by the past. It would not be an exaggeration to say that forgiveness is the most compelling testimony to human freedom.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“That Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns; and they made visible two paths—the world's path and the pathway that is God's. One has eclipsed the other; now the sword has joined the shepherd's crook; the two together must of necessity result in evil.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Purgatorio

“For the place where I was put to live
is stripped of good more and more each day
and seems disposed to perdition.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Purgatorio