Jenny

“Tuning in to the rhetoric these communities use, and how its influence works for both good and not so good, can help us participate, however we choose, with clearer eyes.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence

“One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“It’s not that smart people aren’t capable of believing in cultish things; instead, says Shermer, it’s that smart people are better at “defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence

“Eternity is always presented to us as an idea that we can’t grasp, as something enormous, enormous! Why does it have to be enormous? All of a sudden, instead of all that, imagine there’ll be a little room, something like a country bathhouse, sooty, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity. You know, I sometimes imagine it like that.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe