Peter Brown

“To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Lists (3) alcohol, fasting, thirsting, sweat lodges, self-mutilation, sleep deprivation, dance, bleeding, mushrooms, immersion in ice water, kava, flagellation with thorns or animal teeth, cactus flesh, tobacco, exposure to the elements, long-distance running, hypnosis, meditation, rhythmic drumming and chanting, jimsonweed, nightshade, Salvia divinorum, pungent or aromatic scents, toad sweat, tantric sex, spinning in circles, amphetamines, sedatives, opioids, hallucinogens, nitrous oxide, oxytocin, holding one’s breath, jumping off cliffs, nitrites, kratom, coca leaves, cocoa, caffeine, entheogens— ethylene, an entheogenic gas, escapes from the ground under Delphi”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

“How do people regain control when their animal brains are stuck in a fight for survival? If what goes on deep inside our animal brains dictates how we feel, and if our body sensations are orchestrated by subcortical (subconscious) brain structures, how much control over them can we actually have?”
― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science