Eidam289

“One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies.37 The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.38”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures

“In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47 He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“V ľudoch sa hromadí hnev na Západ, na Ameriku, na Úniu, na Vás. Vediem centrum drogovo závislých. Už roky navštevujem konferencie v celej Európe. Vždy opakujem, my žijeme ináč, ale problémy sú tie isté: ako dať deťom lepšiu buducnosť, starcom dôstojnu smrť, svetu mier. Ale pre vás život v mieri znamená život podľa vašich pravidiel. Hovoríte, že islam je spiatočnícky, že naša demokracia je slabá a tradície sú hlúpe. Nanucujete nám zmeny lebo vy najlepšie viete, ako sa má žiť v 21. storočí. Ak sa pokušame zmenit, veď od cias Ataturka nič ine nerobíme, smejete sa na nám.”
― Witold Szabłowski

“It seems we have to face a painful fact. ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species,’ says Brian Hare, puppy expert, ‘also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’1 People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History