Morten Oddvik

“In an American context, Lasch argued that narcissism as a social phenomenon would lead not to fascism, but to a broad depoliticization of society, in which struggles for social justice were reduced to personal psychological problems.8 Lasch wrote well before the rise of Donald Trump, a political figure who almost perfectly embodies the narcissism he describes. Narcissism led Trump into politics, but a politics driven less by public purposes than his own inner needs for public affirmation.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

“It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire. Yet”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind