The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding and preserving history. Destroying the past undermines our ability to learn and grow from it.
Simone Weil's quote suggests that the annihilation of historical events, memories, and cultural heritage is a significant moral transgression. By erasing the past, we lose valuable lessons, contexts, and identities that shape our present and future, highlighting the necessity of acknowledging and learning from history rather than dismissing or destroying it.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote this to emphasize how understanding our history helps shape our future.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending.
I detect more good than evil in humanity._x000D_ _x000D_ Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,_x000D_ _x000D_ And men grow better as the world grows old.
It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.
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