Mary

“...it's not surprising that Charlotte wants me to be the mother for her now. I can be the "normal" parent who safely and lovingly drives the car, and she can have the experience of being taken care of in a way she never has before. But in order to cast me in the competent role, Charlotte believes she has to cast herself as the helpless one, letting me see only her problems -- or, as Wendell once put it in relation to what I do with him: "seduce me with her misery." Patients often do this as a way to ensure that the therapist won't forget about their pain if they mention something positive.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“We are enjoined to thank veterans, and them alone, for the supposed ease of American life, as though the Voting Rights Act, or the eight-hour day, or the minimum wage, had been wrested from a foreign power by movie-handsome SEALS in the Pacific. The American civilian is made to feel a signatory to two social contracts: the democratic one we learn about in school, and the imperial one, in which our enlightened, humane way of life is an unsustainable bubble in a dark world, maintained by an organization that terrorizes its employees, crushes dissent, scorns vulnerability, intermittently practices torture, resents the Geneva Convention.”
― Phil Christman, Midwest Futures

“Inflation, unemployment, the political crises and, not least, the folly of lands abroad, had made the German people restless; a tremendous desire for order animated all circles of the German people, to whom order had always been more important than freedom and justice. And anyone who promised order – even Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice – could count on hundreds of thousands of supporters from the start.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

“When a federal court upholds a law that literally makes it a crime to give a child a cup of water in the desert; when Immigrants and Customs Enforcement abducts a child at an airport in order to force the (undocumented) parents to turn themselves in; when Border Patrol shoots people at the Mexican border with tear gas; that's the reactionary response to a warming world. It is a much simpler and more satisfying response than regulating energy companies or taxing carbon. It only has two problems. It is evil, and it will result in, if nothing else, the end of this country. People who want to live in such a world are already too querulous to make a society, even with each other, even if they get everything they want. Picture them trying to manage a baking earth, an evaporating Lake Superior riddled with Asian carp, a countryside full of feral bacteria and reeking of CAFOs that produce less food every year. It won't work. A fully achieved Fortress America would just be the Donner Party a day or two before the cannibalism starts.”
― Phil Christman, Midwest Futures