Jana Meyer

“Because there are other people for whom being generous comes easily, without a struggle. And it’s easy for them because in the past they made a lot of little decisions to be generous. It was hard for me because I’ve made a lot of little decisions to be selfish in the past. So I’m the reason it’s hard for me to be generous.”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and that we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

“What does freedom mean to me? This question has occupied me my entire life. Naturally, politically, because freedom needs democratic conditions, without democracy there is no freedom, no rule of law, no protection of human rights. But this question also occupies me on another level. Freedom, for me, is finding out where my own limits are, and pushing my own limits. Freedom is for me not to stop learning, not to have to stand still but to be allowed to continue, even after leaving politics.” - Angela Merkel”
― Angela Merkel, Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021

“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart