Simon

“History shows that in the absence of violent leveling events, inequality was commonly quite high relative to its theoretical maximum and could remain high for extended periods of time.”
― Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: ‘Each time I return to England from abroad,’ he observed, ‘the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’29”
― Philip Stephens, Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit

“The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI