[quotes] Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge 2017

 

"The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings."

"I write - and read - to assure myself that other people have felt what I'm feeling too, that it isn't just me, that this is real, and valid, and true."

"Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak."

"What history had I inherited that left me alien in my place of birth?"

"We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power."

"White children are taught not to 'see' race, whereas children of colour are taught - often with no explanation - that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed."

"In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon - earned or not - because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system."

"There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power. Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be cruel, vindictive and prejudiced. Everyone has the capacity to be nasty to other people, to judge them before they get to know them. But there simply aren't enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on the kind of grand scale it currently operates against black people."

"'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...'"

"She is a white immigrant in Britain, which makes her both an outsider and insider: an outsider because her country has its own culture, and its own well-documented racism, and an insider because her white American-ness will have her positioned as an 'expat' rather than an 'immigrant'."

"At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn't represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilization."

"As an adult Harry Potter fan, I'd begun to think of Hermione Granger, with her house-elf liberation campaign, as a well-meaning but guilty-feeling white liberal, taking on a social justice cause with gusto without ever really consulting the views and feelings of the people she was fighting for."

"It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth."

"Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people... Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default."

"There is a difference between saying 'we want to be included' and saying 'we want to reconstruct your exclusive system'. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream."

"Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist poet Audre Lorde who said: 'your silence will not protect you.' Who wins when we don't speak? Not us."

"If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it's up to you... It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you're doing something."

[quotes] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari 2014

 

"This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language."

"Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?"

"Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world."

"This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."

"The numerical success of the calf's species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures."

"This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution."

"Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers."

"Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted."

"Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something."

"Worse still, even when subject peoples were successful in adopting the imperial culture, it could take decades, if not centuries, until the imperial elite accepted them as part of 'us'."

"Just as Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fueled by indifference."

"Each year the US population spends more on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world."

"Manchester United fans, vegetarians and environmentalists are other examples. They, too, are defined above all by what they consume."

"However, in order to understand macro-historical processes, we need to examine mass statistics rather than individual stories."

"Still, it's nice when modern research - bolstered by lots of numbers and charts - reaches the same conclusions the ancients did."

"When we try to guess or imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won't work because it pastes our expectations on to the material conditions of others."

"Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions - none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin."

"As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how."

[quotes] The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck - Mark Manson 2017

 

"You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon."

"Because here's another sneaky little truth about life. You can't be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others."

"Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what's truly fuck-worthy."

"In other words, negative emotions are a call to action."

"Thus entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
1. I'm awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment."

"Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else."

"It's easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure."

"We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don't fit in with much of the rest of the world, to stare our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all."

"The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it."

"These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the values that we've chosen and have learned to live up to."

"I say don't find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that's what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others."

"As a general rule, we're all the world's worst observers of ourselves."

"... beliefs are arbitrary; worse yet, they're often made up after the fact to justify whatever values and metrics we've chosen for ourselves."

"That's simply reality: if it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself."

"... Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture..."

"Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they've always wanted."

"... we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we're aware of all the other options we're potentially forfeiting."

"Commitment gives you freedom because you're no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous."

"... I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything."

"... in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever."

"All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects."

[quotes] Small Gods - Terry Pratchett 1992

 

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned."

"There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depend largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval."

"There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed."

"'Where there is punishment, there is always a crime,' said Vorbis. 'Somethings the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God.'"

"'If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless.'"

"He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn't that he's evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can't help it. You catch it off him."

"'Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.'"

"'If you muck up people's minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do it all your fault!'"

"Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings."

[quotes] Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants - Susie Kelly 2017

 

"The emergency was that the people whom this country rightfully belonged now wanted to run it themselves."

"[On trophy hunting:] It is not even as if there is any skill needed, just sufficient money and an adequate gun. It seems such an utterly pointless and negative activity."

"... I was dubious that even if it ever became law it would lead to an equitable distribution of land, as the wealthiest landowners would find ways to circumnavigate the law - easily done by forming a company - and therefore not count as individuals."

"All those who made comments like that had one thing in common, which was that they had never been to Kenya."

"'I am sure that there are a lot of people who have never visited Africa or Kenya. They think Kenya is Africa and Africa is Kenya. Showing your photographs that you took helps them to know exactly what you are talking about."

"The wind,
In it was a scent,
So hard to remember,
So hard to forget,
Memories long forgotten,
A past so vivid,
A stranger so familiar.

I wake up to a dream,
And see the wind,
In it is a scent,
So hard to remember,
So hard to forget,
Africa.
The scent of my childhood."

[quotes] Ishmael - Daniel Quinn 1992

 

"... no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library."

"You, who have had a name from birth and who probably think that even a pet dog is aware of having a name (which is untrue), cannot imagine what a revolution in perception the acquisition of a name produced in me."

"... uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone."

"'You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.'"

"I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world."

"The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was born to do."

"They don't know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects."

"Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated."

"It's the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee."

"'Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.'"

"'The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.'"

"They're going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they're going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds."

[quotes] Passionate Nomad, The Life of Freya Stark - Jane Fletcher Geniesse 1999

 

"No crime short of murder... can be comparable to the crime of destroying in another the capacity to love: and this happens sometimes through the rashness of parents... but more often through some bitterness of experience when youth is still defenseless."

"I cannot help believing that if she had wanted life more, she could have held it: but she was not interested, and accepted death as she had accepted her marriage and her baptism, and no one outside her could help."

"I hope I shall not become so, resenting ideas that are not my ideas, and seeing the world with all its changes and growth as a series of congealed formulas."

"I never imagined that my first sight of the desert would come with such a shock of beauty and enslave me right away."

"But anything was possible, Freya was now allowing herself to believe, if she could only detach herself from the tender shackles that had kept her bound to home for so long."

"It came I think from a feeling which influences me greatly, whose beginning I cannot remember and whose origin I cannot trace - a feeling for the value of affection in itself, and a reluctance to waste any of it that happened to come my way."

"Freya was burnishing her new persona, burying the shy girl of her youth and creating a self-sufficiency to match her growing reputation as a person of fearless, even heroic, deeds."

"How brittle in reality are all the things whose permanence is never questioned."

"Freya, the chronic nomad, liked the thought of Venetia's stable life, while Venetia enjoyed the open horizons of Freya's."

"It is ridiculous to care so much, but after all there is less difference between us and a lizard than between us and God and we expect Him to feel an interest."

"Bribing people to adjust their beliefs was both cynical and repugnant."

"After Flora's death she used the writing to understand their complicated relationship and came to a forgiveness and reconciliation she could not have achieved had Flora been alive."

"... and the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows."

"Perseverance is often praised, but it is not so often realized that another quality must accompany it to make it of any value - and that is elasticity; perseverance in only one direction very often fails: but if one is ready to take whatever road is offered, and to change the chosen way, if circumstances change, and yet to keep the end in view - then success is infinitely more probable."

"And it hardly made sense, she insisted, to make Palestinians pay with their homes and lands for injuries done to Jews by European Christians."

[quotes] The Story of My Experiments with Truth - Mohandas K. Gandhi autobiography 1948

 

"Her duty was easily converted into my right to exact faithfulness from her, and if it had to be exacted, I should be watchfully tenacious of the right."

"I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education. I tried later to improve mine, but it was too late."

"True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world. Only between like natures can friendship be altogether worthy and enduring."

"... the change harmonized my inward and outward life. It was also more in keeping with the means of my family. My life was certainly more truthful and my soul knew no bounds of joy."

 "So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower."

"The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial - only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice... Redress for wrongs I should seek only to the extent that would be necessary for the removal of the colour prejudice."

"Was this the meaning of Christianity? Did they cease to be Indians because they had become Christians?"

"I should not exhaust my skill as a fighter in insisting on retaining my turban. It was worthy of a better cause."

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings."

"It is only the English-speaking ones who will not learn it, as though knowledge of English were an obstacle to learning our own languages."

"Such service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes the spirit."

"A patriot cannot afford to ignore any branch of service to the motherland."

"A public institution means an institution conducted with the approval, and from the funds, of the public. When such an institution ceases to have public support, it forfeits the right to exist. Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible to acts contrary to it."

"It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should except nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution."

"The deeper the search in the mine of truth the richer the discovery of the gems buried there, in the shape of openings for an ever greater variety of service."

"I believed then and I believe even now, that, no matter what amount of work one has, one should always find some time for exercise, just as one does for one's meals... far from taking away from one's capacity for work, it adds to it."

"A writer almost always presents one aspect of a case, whereas every case can be seen from no less than seven points of view, all of which are probably correct by themselves, but not correct at the same time and in the same circumstances."

"The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy."

"It is a rare thing in this world to be born as a human being, and I would far rather die in your arms than pollute my body with such abominations."

"... even truthfulness in the practice of the profession cannot cure it of the fundamental defect that vitiates it."

"I had seen packets of indigo, but little dreamed that it was grown and manufactured in Champaran at great hardship to thousands of agriculturists."

"My coworkers and I had built many castles in the air, but they all vanished for the time being."

"... whose desperate struggle for bread renders them insensible to all feelings of decency and self-respect. And our philanthropists, instead of providing work for them and insisting on their working for bread, give them alms."

"Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good."

"The lesson was indelibly imprinted on the public mind that the salvation of the people depends upon themselves, upon their capacity for suffering and sacrifice."

"What a tragedy that the language of the country should be taboo in meetings held in the country, for work relating to the country, and that a speech there in Hindustani by a stray individual like myself should be a matter for congratulations!"

"It was one interwoven with my course of life which is guided by principles no longer depending upon outside authority."

"To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself."

"That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means."

"In bidding farewell to the reader... I ask him to join with me in prayer to the God of Truth that He may grant me the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed."

[quotes] Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 2004

 

"If you're a grown man when you read this - it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then - I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things."

"... and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent."

"So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That's what he always to be, at any rate."

"We'd go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren't many."

"You may not remember me at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."

"But in fact one lapse in judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible."

"I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life."

"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice."

"I never dared to ask him what he'd been up to. I couldn't risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions."

"It was kindly intended, but not considerate, I understand that."

"Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience... How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance to we perform it?"

"... she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me."

"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am."

"Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."

"... just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with."

"I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back."

"How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me?"

"... and he would protect him like a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having."

"They mattered or they didn't and that's the end of it."

"Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view."

"I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love - I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence."

[quotes] The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan 1989

 

"And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English."

"In me, they see their own daughters, just as arrogant, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English."

"I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother."

"It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish to think she could use faith to change fate."

"And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation."

"And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so I could shout back and blame her for all my misery."

"But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age."

"The power of my words was that strong."

"That's the way Chinese mothers show they love their children, not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck's gizzards, and crab."

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

"Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth."

"It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?"

"In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you."