Catherine

“The more I have studied disparities in multicultural societies, the more I have found the language of “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” to be fundamentally misleading. These words assume that there is something normal or “to be expected” about seeing different ethnic groups represented at precisely their share of the total population in every domain, statistic, and occupation, when in fact nothing is more normal than for different subcultures to specialize in particular sectors and occupations and experience very different group-wide statistics as a result. The vast majority of such disparities are not plausibly explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness but by demographic and cultural differences between the groups in question at a particular time.”
― Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

“I ended this study of active life with a curious sentence that Cicero ascribed to Cato, who used to say that “never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself’ (Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset).7 Assuming Cato was right, the questions are obvious: What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think

“Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.”
― Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground

“Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses. Hegel was right when he pointed out that “the This of sense . . . cannot be reached by language”8 Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that led to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place?”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think