Alex Davis

“By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“How like unto Gilgamesh is this man,” they did affirm. “He is tall in stature and strong as a battlement. Surely was he begotten in the mountains. His strength is as mighty as a rock fallen from the Heavens.”
― Gerald J. Davis, Gilgamesh: The New Translation