Herval Freire

“self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains. They all want to stand on ever higher ground to gaze ever farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival. Had you, for example, been only concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and far as you could. Instead, you chose to come and climb it. The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

“In France, this general climate of distrust toward private capitalism was deepened after 1945 by the fact that many members of the economic elite were suspected of having collaborated with the German occupiers and indecently enriched themselves during the war. It was in this highly charged post-Liberation climate that major sectors of the economy were nationalized, including in particular the banking sector, the coal mines, and the automobile industry. The Renault factories were punitively seized after their owner, Louis Renault, was arrested as a collaborator in September 1944.”
― Anonymous