Ben Levin

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

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

“When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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