Noor

“It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“The human senses are known to be astoundingly unreliable instruments, easily deceived and fallible. Would you bet everything on shoddy detection equipment? That’s what the materialists have done. Above all, they sneer at the concept of the soul (and mind) because it is something that cannot be detected with the human senses. Would the cosmic mathematical mind reject the soul? The numbers zero and infinity rationally characterize it. Why would zero and infinity be forbidden? Just because the human senses aren’t configured to detect them? Why should the dubious human senses be the determinants of what is mathematically and logically permitted to exist? Human senses are the products of evolution and are designed to allow us to live in this world; they did not evolve as organs of truth to allow us to determine the fundamental nature of reality. […] Most people alive today are irrational. Animals are irrational. […] Even scientists have demonstrated that they will force reason and logic to obey the senses rather than force the senses to obey reason and logic. The question of the existence of the soul is one for reason, not for the human senses. Lack of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
― Mike Hockney, The God Equation

“Until I am welcomed everywhere as an equal simply because I am human, I remain a warrior on a battlefield that I must not leave. I continue to be a warrior who does not cry but who instead takes action. If one person is denied equality, we are all denied equality.”
― Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry

“In Germany, no child finishes high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it—what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer hanging over the whole thing. “Well, that was shameful, now wasn’t it?” In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: “There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.” It was the same for us. “Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let’s move on.” Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. “Whatever you do, don’t make the kids angry.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood