Caleb Ringger

“It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. ... The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“There is no true, clean, definitive way to separate the art from the artist. Art fully separated from the artist ceases, in a fundamental way, to be art at all. The artist gives the art meaning.”
― Rob Harvilla, 60 Songs That Explain the '90s

“Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into "white men," as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Why do you hate the South?"

"I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” ”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!