Karin

“It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advanced
civilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Even
in economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.
Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space but
to preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture has
become unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortex
consuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,
political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspired
insurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Left
must recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Art
unites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, the
society that forgets art risks losing its soul.”
― Camille Paglia

“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil