Steve Greenleaf

“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

“All history is the history of longing. The details of policy; the migration of peoples; the abstractions that nations kill and die for, including the abstraction of “the nation” itself—all can be ultimately traced to the viscera of human desire. Human beings have wanted innumerable, often contradictory things—security and dignity, power and domination, sheer excitement and mere survival, unconditional love and eternal salvation—and those desires have animated public life. The political has always been personal.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

“The final words of Bergson’s 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion could have been written today: “Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining whether they want to go on living or not.”
― Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People