Betsy Hagestedt

“We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Because anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”
“Why do they need to?”
She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”
I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just… churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“[…]any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“What are the environment? Don’t you think that’s something worth protesting for?”
Ryan was slow to answer; the sadness was again in his voice. “If we cannot raise our level of sanity to the point that we care about other humans, about our own species, we will never learn to care about all the other species we share this planet with.”
― Harold R. Johnson, Corvus