María Braeuner

“Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check. But in so doing, we had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“More vigorous yet is the strategy practiced by the influenza, common cold, and pertussis (whooping cough) microbes, which induce the victim to cough or sneeze, thereby launching a cloud of microbes toward prospective new hosts. Similarly, the cholera bacterium induces in its victim a massive diarrhea that delivers bacteria into the water supplies of potential new victims, while the virus responsible for Korean hemorrhagic fever broadcasts itself in the urine of mice. For modification of a host’s behavior, nothing matches rabies virus, which not only gets into the saliva of an infected dog but drives the dog into a frenzy of biting and thus infecting many new victims. But for physical effort on the bug’s own part, the prize still goes to worms such as hookworms and schistosomes, which actively burrow through a host’s skin from the water or soil into which their larvae had been excreted in a previous victim’s feces. Thus, from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are “symptoms of disease.” From a germ’s point of view, they’re clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“I said that it was amazing to me that a group of anthropologists wouldn’t recognize the biases that they were perpetuating themselves.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“The favorable break came through Carnegie, but what about the determination, definiteness of purpose, and the desire to attain the goal, and the persistent effort of twenty-five years? It was no ordinary desire that survived disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of “waste of time.” It was a burning desire! An obsession!”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich