Ian Janssen

“The ability to detect fallacy is one of the things that makes democratic life decent.”
― Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

“Where history showed us only ramparts and frontiers, poetry discovered a mysterious predestination that makes two adversaries, whose meeting is inexorable, worthy of each other. And Homer asks no quarter, save from poetry, which repossesses beauty from death and wrests from it the secret of justice that history cannot fathom. To the darkened world poetry alone restores pride, eclipsed by the arrogance of the victors and the silence of the vanquished.”
― Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad

“Being happy is for what?”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad