Simone Weil

“Humility is attentive patience.”

“To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.”

“Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.”

“In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.”

“More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”

“There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.”

“The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.”

“The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”

“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.”

“A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.”

“What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.”

“The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.”