Jonathon P Sine

“One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“Anyone who fights monsters should see to it that he does not also become a monster. When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks also into you.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents...Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a belief in a devil.”

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

“Among the laws that rule human societies there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all the others. In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.”

“Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

“The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal...Owning a hidden option at someone else’s expense.”

“When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

“We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the misty bulk of history we perceived the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. And now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world. We feel that a civilization is fragile as a life.”