Monday, May 05, 2003

‘This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.’

- Hannah Arendt, strangely enough in ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’, The Origins of Totalitarianism.