Jiří Mašek

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution