We Love Quote Quilts

More and more of our experience thus becomes an invention rather than discovery. The more planned and prefabricated our experience becomes, the more we include in it only what "interests" us. Then we can more effectively exclude the exotic world beyond our ken: the very world which would jar our experience, and which we most need to make us more largely human. The criterion of well-knownness overshadows others, because the well-known is by definition what most people already know. We seek celebrities, not only among men and women, but even among books, plays, ideas, movies, and commodities. We make our whole experience a "reader's digest" where we read only what we want to read, and not what anyone else wants to write. We listen for what we want to hear and not for what someone wants to say. We talk to ourselves, without even noticing that it is not somebody else talking to us. We talk to ourselves about what we are supposed to be talking about. We find this out by seeing what other people are talking to themselves about. "All I know," Will Rogers remarked in the earlier days of the Graphic Revolution, "is what I read in the papers." Today he might modernize his complaint: "All I see in the papers is what I already know."

— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

 

To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk"—except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust

 

To love God truly, one must first love all humanity. If anyone tells you that they love God and do not love others, you will know that they are lying. What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you do, but you love yourself anyway. So must you love your neighbors, no matter how many faults you see in them.

—Martin Buber, by way of Joe Charny in A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting