Though Provoking Quotes

“Imagine someone from that future could go back in time and talk to you—someone who lives at a time in which mankind only inhabits one planet, who is arguably among the final generations of humans capable of permanently changing the future of human cultures across thousands of planets by creating a durable culture and high-fertility-rate family that carries prosocial values into the future. Why would you tell them you didn’t make an effort to fix things while one person's efforts could still make a difference? ”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“Don't worry about the future, sooner or later it's the past. If they say the feeling's gone then it's time to take it back.”
― Meat Loaf

“A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Over the next two hours, I would learn something about time. Something devastating. There are moments in life when time moves with its own will, not bound by any timekeeper's measure. It may speed up, passing so fast that life itself becomes a blur, a memory before it is a moment. On a different occasion, time may slow to a crawl, each second becoming an hour, a day, or a lifetime. Which means that time cannot be trusted.”
― Jennifer A. Nielsen, Iceberg

“I laugh because it is hilarious. The thing humans think we are is just so different and they have even made movies that I’ve seen, they are just joke, literally.
“The version humans have made of us is extremely strange. We can die from a gun made from obsidian and knives made of pure molten rock. But other then that we are im- mortal, we can get ill but there are ways to never be ill, there are ways to never be mur- dered, so we are practically immortal what a shame that humans are completely mortal, you can’t stop illness like we can and you certainly can die from an abundance of things. But I am sure you live your lives to the fullest, right? Not a single day goes by without doing something worth remembering, right?”
― Ahlehgra-Neroli Mattherson