However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through... extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ultimately the two men are united by their reaction to the French Revolution, for it was Rousseau's explosive concept of the Gener...al Will coupled with the breakdown of the social order which in the long run created both Emperor and Fuhrer. The former ensured the demolition of Christian Europe, while the latter completed it.... Napoleon saw himself as offering a via media between the ancien regime and the Terror. He claimed to have "cleansed" the revolution, combining with it what was best from the past, morally regenerated by Revolutionary ideals. Yet for all his protestations, he accepted the Revolution only because it made his career possible, and because those who had profited from it were ready to support his regime. Similarly, Hitler argued that he was steering a middle path between capitalism and Marxism. National Socialists claimed that their political and social programme had thwarted the machinations of international finance, while at the same time defeating the evil consequences of the French Revolution as embodied in its children--liberalism and, above all, Bolshevism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The blood of Abraham, God's father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has bee...n spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God--an anguished cry for peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During medieval times, all those emotions were missing which have made us cautious and tentative in matters of justice: the insigh...t into diminished capacity, the concept of judicial fallibility, the awareness that society has to share in the blame for the guilt of individuals, the question whether an individual ought not be rehabilitated rather than made to suffer. Or, perhaps, better stated: a vague sense of all this is not lacking, but rather concentrates itself, unverbalized, in instant impulses of charity and forgiveness, unconcerned with the issue of guilt, which could suddenly break through the cruel satisfaction over the administration of justice. While we administer a hesitant, toned down justice, partially filled with a guilty conscience, the Middle Ages knew only two extremes: the full measure of cruel punishment or mercy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A few hours' mountain climbing turns a rogue and a saint into two roughly equal creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equal...ity and fraternity--and liberty is finally added by sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked ...is like deep darkness; they do not know what they stumble over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »