Ben Levin

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.”
― George Eliot

“Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism