E. Merrill Brouder

“Here [...] sheer daring worked miracles; the god of courage was on their side.”
― Vasily Grossman, L'inferno di Treblinka

“Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate, These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.”
― Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived

“The tremendous power of persuasion inherent in the main ideologies of our times is not accidental. Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs. Plausibility in these matters comes neither from scientific facts, as the various brands of Darwinists would like us to believe, nor from historical laws, as the historians pretend, in their efforts to discover the law according to which civilizations rise and fall. Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine. It is true that sometimes—and such is the case with racism—an ideology has changed its original political sense, but without immediate contact with political life none of them could be imagined. Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises first from the desire to provide watertight arguments, and second because their persuasive power also got hold of scientists, who no longer were interested in the result of their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the multitude their new interpretations of life and world. We owe it to these “scientific” preachers rather than to any scientific findings that today no single science is left into whose categorical system race-thinking has not deeply penetrated. This again has made historians, some of whom have been tempted to hold science responsible for race-thinking, mistake certain either philological or biological research results for causes instead of consequences of race-thinking.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“It is unlikely that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin