Cristina

“Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo

“We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It’s understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn’t an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can’t immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine. But history suggests that’s a mistake, and it’s one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Public health is not an ideology, religion, or political perspective—indeed, history demonstrates that whenever such forces interfere with or influence public health activities a general worsening of the populace’s well-being usually followed.”
― Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust