Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it. – Simone Weil
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves. – Simone Weil
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. – Simone Weil
The only way into truth is through ones own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation. – Simone Weil
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. – David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country