Curtis Oneal

“Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t. If we chose to, we could acknowledge that cutoff dates matter.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Above all, Reigisaho is an expression of mutual respect in person-to-person encounters, a respect for each other’s personalities, a respect which results from the martial artist’s confrontations with life-or-death situations. The culmination of the martial artist’s experience is the expression of love for all humanity. This expression of love for all of humanity is Reigisaho. The belief that each person is important functions as a filter to purify and sublimate the martial artist’s personality and dignity.”
― Andrea Billingiere, A Beginner's Guide to Aikido

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“No matter where we live, the result is the same: as people identify with increasingly narrow tribes, they begin to view those with different views as alien, not worth respecting or even treating as human. The Beyond Conflict Institute’s 2020 report, America’s Divided Mind, didn’t mince any words: “Increasingly, Americans who identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies who represent a profound threat to their identities.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World