You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. - Hannah Arendt

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

something had been lost that was perhaps an essential ingredient - a man can live without self-respect, but a group shatters, dispersed by the ugliness it sees reflected in itself.

He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.