Essay

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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt

On the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust.

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Arendt, Hanna. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963. Originally published by The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 1963.

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If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Henry David Thoreau

Life Without Principle

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Thoreau, Henry David. "Life Without Principle." The Atlantic, Oct. 1863.

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Thoreau, Henry David. "Life Without Principle." Walden and Other Writings. Modern Library, 2000.

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I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

John Stuart Mill

Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy

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Mill, John Stuart. Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865, ch. 7.

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Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir. William Hamilton's Philosophy. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson. Vol. 9, Routledge, 2009, ch. 7.

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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James

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James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." Longman's Magazine. London: C. J. Longman, 4 Sept. 1884.

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James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." The Portable Henry James. Penguin Classics, 2003.

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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Susan Sontag

Freak Show

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Sontag, Susan. "Freak Show." The New York Review of Books, 15 Nov. 1973.

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The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Bertrand Russell

On the Value of Scepticism

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Russell, Bertrand. "On the Value of Skepticism." Sceptical Essays. George Allen and Unwin Ltd./W. W. Norton & Company, 1928.

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It may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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Theodicy

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Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. 1710, pt. 1.

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As long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Aldous Huxley

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Huxley, Aldous. Ends and Means (an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization). Chatto & Windus, 1937, ch. 8.

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I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.

William Lloyd Garrison

To the Public

On American slavery.

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Garrison, William Lloyd. "To the Public." The Liberator, 1 Jan. 1831.

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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

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Huxley, Aldous. "A Case of Voluntary Ignorance." Collected Essays. Harper & Brothers, 1959. Originally published Esquire, 1 Oct. 1956.

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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Gore Vidal

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Vidal, Gore. "Writing Plays for Television." New World Writing, 1956.

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Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

Fran Lebowitz

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Lebowitz, Fran. "People." Social Studies. Random House, 1981.

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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

Read this essay at harpers.org

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Franzen, Jonathan. "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels." Harper's Magazine, Apr. 1996.

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Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. Picador, 2002.

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All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Havelock Ellis

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Ellis, Havelock. Little Essays of Love and Virtue. George H. Doran Company/A & C Black, 1922, ch. 7.

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Suicide... Is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed

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Sheed, Wilfrid. The Good Word & Other Words. E. P. Dutton, 1978, pt. 1, ch. 15.

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Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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The Portable Atheist

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Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. "How (and Why) I Became an Infidel." The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, edited by Christopher Hitchens. Da Capo Press, 2007, ch. 47.

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What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Frederick Jackson Turner

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

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Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." American Historical Association meeting. 1893, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, USA.

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