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Raids on the Unspeakable

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“Eschatology is not an invitation to escape into a private heaven: it is a call to transfigure the evil and stricken world. It is a witness to the end of this world of ours with its enslaving objectifications — location: 86 ^ref-12882

it is not he who has many possessions that is rich, but he who has no needs.” — location: 264 ^ref-33558

he who has the simplest and most natural needs can be considered to be without needs, since the only needs he has are real ones, and the real ones are not hard to fulfill if one is a free man! — location: 265 ^ref-63544

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. — location: 429 ^ref-52165

what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own? Evidently this is not necessary for “sanity” at all. — location: 442 ^ref-51944

perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally “sane.” — location: 461 ^ref-45701

But desolation is his home: For in desolation he is seized by God And entirely taken over into God, — location: 1347 ^ref-3076

Avoid three kinds of Master: Those who esteem only themselves, For their self-esteem is blindness; Those who esteem only innovations, For their opinions are aimless, Without meaning; Those who esteem only what is established; Their minds Are little cells of ice. — location: 1389 ^ref-48433