Morten Oddvik

“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

“And by God, what a day! You know the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter suddenly seems to give up fighting. For days past we’d been having the kind of beastly weather that people call “bright” weather, when the sky’s a cold hard blue and the wind scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got a chance. You know the kind of day. Pale yellow sunshine, not a leaf stirring, a touch of mist in the far distances where you could see the sheep scattered over the hillsides like lumps of chalk. And down in the valleys fires were burning, and the smoke twisted slowly upwards and melted into the mist. I’d got the road to myself. It was so warm you could almost have taken your clothes off.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“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