"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself, without grace."
Simone Weil
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
The silence under the terror was only the consequence. The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted."
Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz
Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
Gold and silver were hit by a bear raid today.
Stocks managed to hold to even or gain a little.
The Dollar moved sideways.
The most astonishing thing is that it is almost never too late to ask God for forgiveness and mercy.
There are only three things that are required.
Repentance. Repentance. Repentance.
But that requires a recognition and admission of fault, and the will to humble our unworthy selves and accept His mercy, and go and sin no more.
And this is why the proud and unrepentant harden their hearts, and firmly close the door to their own personal hells, which they themselves have fashioned, locked from the inside.
And so here, at long last, we are.
Have a pleasant evening.
